SoundHound’s first app is known as one of the best offerings when it comes to recognizing sounds. You could hum a song and the app could, fairly reliably, tell you which one you were humming. Now, the same company has released a new app, called Hound, which attempts to usurp the Google Now throne with some really impressive voice assistant technology…
It doesn’t have any OS-level integration of course, and—unlike Siri and Google Now—it can’t do useful things like tap into your apps to complete tasks and give you answers based on information in your emails. But maybe Hound doesn’t have to, at least not yet, because it makes up for these shortcomings with some really impressive handling of very complex requests.
The video below does a great job of showing off what Hound can do, but these are only a small sample of the commands it can handle. But what’s more impressive than the number of commands you can give it is the app’s context-awareness (similar to what Google showed off at I/O), and its ability to answer questions worded in very complex ways.
For example, Hound can provide an answer to this: “Give me a list of hotels in Jacksonville with availability Thursday at prices lower than 200 dollars, staying three nights that have a pool and are pet friendly.”
Hound is currently in beta, and SoundHound says that you’re going to need an invite to get access for the time being. To do that, you can head to the Hound website or you can head over to the Play Store and install the app. From there, simply tap on “Request Invite” and give Hound your email address. Invites are rolling out rapidly the company says, and as soon as we get ours, we’ll be doing a full hands-on with the app.
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