SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SoundHound Inc.®, a pioneering company in sound recognition and search technologies, today launched Houndify™, the world’s most advanced developer platform that enables anyone to seamlessly create a smart, voice-enabled, conversational interface with the company’s technology. Houndify enables developers to revolutionize their products and services. Several partner companies, including Expedia.com and AccuWeather, have committed to providing their own data and APIs to the Houndify platform, so developers can integrate with their services.
Houndify initially unveiled its private beta program in June, and quickly received thousands of applications, ranging from large enterprises to individual developers. The platform is now open to anyone. Third-party products can easily integrate Houndify’s unprecedented technology advantages, including:
- Speech-to-Meaning technology, which simultaneously combines voice recognition and natural language understanding, resulting in extremely fast and accurate voice interaction experiences.
- Context understanding and follow-up questions, including awareness of location or prior queries, which results in a flow of natural interactions instead of halting, keyword based interaction.
- Complex and compound queries, meaning users can ask multiple questions at once with results filtered or in sequence.
“The demand for a fast and accurate, natural, voice-enabled, and conversational interface to the exploding number of connected devices is upon us,” said Keyvan Mohajer, SoundHound Inc. Founder and CEO. “Houndify provides the technologies for the next generation of human-computer interaction, and by opening our platform, third parties can instantly ignite their own products and services with natural voice commands, benefitting from the years it took us to develop this visionary technology. “
Additionally, Houndify’s platform design provides these advantages:
- Cross-platform SDKs: Houndify provides software development kits (SDKs) across many popular operating systems and platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, Unix, Raspberry Pi, and others, giving unparalleled speed-to-market and the ability to scale.
- Rapidly increasing domain access: Houndify offers developers access to a rapidly growing number of published and private “domains,” which are programs that provide users with relevant information or actions related to their queries, from home automation, to car control, to local search, to weather, to sports and beyond.
“The necessary capabilities for this type of technology have historically been inaccessible, difficult to learn and prohibitive for mass adoption,” explains Mohajer. “For the first time, Houndify provides an easy way to create custom experiences using voice, while being platform agnostic and rapidly scalable.”
Developers seeking to Houndify their products and services will be able to access domains and API data provided by SoundHound Inc. and from the following launch partners, with several anticipated partnerships to be announced in the coming months:
- Expedia.com: hotel, flight and vacation booking data
- AccuWeather: local weather information and forecasts
- Sportradar: pre-match, live and post-match data for more than 50 sports
- Xignite: deep stock market information
- FlightStats: real-time flight data and airport information
- Open Exchange Rates: real-time currency exchange rates
“As the world’s weather authority, we have been providing real time weather data to consumers and enterprises for over 50 years,” said David Mitchell, Vice President of Emerging Platforms at AccuWeather Inc. “By making our API available through Houndify, we are thrilled to be a part of the upcoming disruption in voice-enabled conversational interfaces with connected devices and the Internet of Things, where our data will be available to anyone, anywhere.”
“We see a future whereby travelers are compelled to use voice interaction with products and services,” said George Hatoun, Director of Product Management for Expedia. “We are excited by the thought of app users saying, ‘Show me 4 or 5 star pet friendly hotels in Seattle for this weekend that cost less than $300 per night’ and instantly receiving an answer with the hotels most relevant to the user’s voice search. Hound is leading the way in this space and Houndify is a great platform to explore its potential.”
The first application to showcase the Houndify platform is SoundHound Inc.’s own voice search and assistant app, Hound. Hound launched in June and is currently live on Android and iOS through an invite-only private beta program.
Known publicly as the company behind SoundHound, the music search, discovery and play app with more than 280 million unique downloads globally, SoundHound Inc. has been in stealth mode with its voice technology and natural language understanding research and development over the last decade. The company has quietly been building the technology ingredients needed to create a product that elegantly enables fast and accurate voice search when people speak naturally, and the platform that enables developers to use that technology in their own products.
Developers interested in exploring the Houndify platform can visit www.houndify.com to sign up and learn more. To request access to Hound, or to learn more about SoundHound Inc., please visit www.soundhound.com.
About SoundHound Inc.:
SoundHound Inc. turns sound into understanding and actionable meaning. We believe in enabling humans to interact with the things around them in the same way we interact with each other: by speaking naturally to mobile phones, cars, TVs, music speakers, coffee machines, and every other part of the emerging 'connected' world. Our consumer product, Hound, leverages our Speech-to-Meaning technology to showcase a groundbreaking smartphone experience, and is the first product to leverage and showcase the Houndify platform. Our SoundHound product applies our technology to music, enabling people to discover, explore, and share the music around them, and even find the name of that song stuck in their heads by singing or humming. And through the Houndify platform, we empower developers to be part of the Speech-to-Meaning revolution. Mission: Houndify everything.
