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Android’s new personal voice-assistant app : HOUND

05/10/2024 20mins
Ramesh Ch

TECHNOLOGY,AI,BLOCKCHAIN

In the Animal kingdom, Hound is a type of dog that assists hunters by tracking or chasing the animal being hunted. The hound breeds were the first hunting dogs and is well known for their powerful speed and sense of smell. After having get to know about Hound, a new personal voice-assistant app for android users from SoundHound Inc.,guess the Technology world is getting inspired by this animal breed. Because Hound App, if you watch the demo video, imbibes the speed and accuracy of hound breed dogs to hunt down single query or multiple queries lined up into a single query by its users effectively. Hound App is like a high speed voice-enabled search engine and captures your natural speech with high accuracy.Thus relaxing on the need to speak in fragmented key-words for your speech to get recognised and view the meaning.

Speed and Accuracy – the two key features of Hound that has attracted so many eyeballs in its direction positively. Be it the Android or the iOS user environment, personal assistant/digital assistant on smartphones is no new thing. In reality Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google now definitely have given all smartphone users a good hang of having a digital assistant to use the devices more smartly and complete tasks in count of seconds. Like Siri and Google Now, Hound works by using a smartphone’s receiver to listen to your voice and then analyzes it with software to try and understand what you’re saying. However the former two PAs perform speech recognition first, then send the result to a search or understanding engine, whereas Hound does it immediately and you experience speed and accuracy in a manner you have never experienced before.

Another great ability that differentiated Hound is its ability to handle natural language sentences, including details, specifics, and multiple criteria (think, for example, of describing the hotel you want to find to have a gym, free-wi-fi and be less than $200 a night). Hound can even understand exclusions and negation (for example, if you want to find a place for lunch, but since you’ve had Chinese all week, you can say “show me restaurants nearby, excluding Chinese places”). This empowers you to really get what you’re searching for, quicker and with a great experience.

The searching skill of Hound is something you cannot ignore. Hound effectively presents to you Wikipedia and other related articles exactly matching your search query, but more impressive is that it will read out the first paragraph from Wikipedia page for you. It’s a nice touch, but for those who don’t appreciate the extra chatter, the feature can be thankfully turned off by disabling sound in the settings menu. Now, you might think with this speed and accuracy, Is Hound able to do only such simple information-oriented searches? Well, the answer is No. Hound is a leader in its category for complex searches based on user-set factors. This means that Hound can list down user-specific options based on the location, budget, preferences, convenience, etc of its users. Thus making life easier and meetings and vacations more fun and fruitful ones without wasting anytime searching for best venues at affordable prices, etc. With Hound you Say it,you Get it.

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Few other simple, yet important things that this app does well include Splitting a bill. For instance,If you ask Hound to split a $99 check four ways. It split the check evenly, and even spit out some tax options. How cool is that. Integrated emailing capabilities enjoyed by smartphone users with Siri, Google now, etc., can also be practiced more effectively using Hound.

Hound is also really good at telling you what it’s able to do. The home screen is a clear (and long) list of functions, which is appreciated. Popular feature list of Hound include Weather, Navigation, Local search, Hotel Search + Expedia booking, Web searches – speak what you’re looking for instead of typing, Stock Lookups, SoundHound Now, Mortgage Calculator, Word and phrase translation, Play interactive games, etc.

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Having said all this about Hound app, in the end the fact is that this Beta version app is a functionality powered by codes and like any other app is buggy. Hound is restricted to devices running Android 4.0.3 and up for now, but Soundhound says an iOS version will be available “soon.” Also the project is currently available only in invite-only beta manner.

However as I see it for now this app is an accuracy driven high speed functionality capable to efficiently attend to your voice queries and provide effective voice-assistance in seconds time. This definitely has the potential to excel its mates in digital assistance category and even dictate a major change in the manner smartphones and assistance apps would be viewed and used in future.

Published:05/10/2024

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