SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SoundHound Inc.®, the leading innovator in voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies, today expanded the multi-language text-to-speech (TTS) offerings for its Houndify™ voice AI platform through a partnership with Acapela Group, the leading provider of voice and speech solutions. Starting today, Houndify will now provide access to more than 100 different voices across 32 languages, making it one of the most comprehensive TTS platforms in the world.
The partnership combines Acapela Group’s TTS offerings with the full suite of Houndify’s voice AI technology, including Speech-to-Meaning™ and Deep-Meaning-Understanding™, which delivers unprecedented speed and accuracy in voice recognition and responses, and understands context, such as the user's location or previous queries, to support natural interactions. This means that companies, developers, and brands that are seeking to bring voice assistants and voice interfaces to their products and services have the choice of selecting unique sounding voices that are “off-the-shelf” as well as the option to develop customized, branded voices.
To date, Houndify supports the following TTS languages:
| Arabic |
English (UK) |
Polish |
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| Catalan |
English (US) |
Portuguese |
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| Chinese |
Finnish |
Portuguese (Brazil) |
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| Czech |
French |
Russian |
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| Danish |
French (Canada) |
Sami |
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| Dutch (Belgium) |
German |
Spanish |
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| Dutch (NL) |
Greek |
Spanish (MX) |
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| English |
Italian |
Swedish (Finland) |
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| (Australia) |
Japanese |
Swedish (Gothenburg) |
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| English (India) |
Korean |
Swedish (Scania) |
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| English (Scottish) |
Norwegian |
Turkish |
“By partnering with Acapela Group, we are able to enhance Houndify’s text-to-speech language offerings, and bring conversational interfaces to a global audience,” said James Hom, co-founder and Vice President of SoundHound Inc. “This further solidifies Houndify’s position as the most comprehensive voice AI platform and reinforces our vision of Collective AI, where anyone can easily make their APIs and services available on the Houndify platform.”
“Voice first interfaces are reinventing the way we engage with devices. We are excited to work with SoundHound Inc. to jointly move ahead the voice-first technology disruption that is soundly changing the way we interact with content,” said Remy Cadic, VP Sales of Acapela Group. “Our latest progresses in deep learning and AI are opening exciting and promising opportunities for voice creation and we look forward to hearing our voices working on the Houndify platform around the world.”
Houndify is the first independent AI platform that enables developers and business owners to deploy a conversational interface anywhere and retain control of their brand and users, while differentiating and innovating. Houndify provides all the technology ingredients necessary for voice and AI integration, including the world’s fastest speech recognition, the most sophisticated natural language understanding, easy to use developer tools, knowledge graphs, and a large and rapidly growing number of domains. Domains are programs that provide a natural and fully conversational interface on specific topics, without requiring the users to memorize and use the specific phrasing of hard coded commands or skills. Houndify technologies represent more than a decade of R&D and innovation by SoundHound Inc., resulting in significant and unique advantages.
One of the key advantages of Houndify is its architecture for collaborative intelligence called “Collective AI,” a powerful mechanism that facilitates collaboration among developers in a conversational intelligence environment. Collective AI enables developers to extend the functionality of existing knowledge domains without needing access to or a full understanding of the underlying libraries. This results in a global AI with comprehensive knowledge that is always learning, is crowdsourced to domain experts, and is larger than the sum of its parts.
The architecture already provides access to knowledge and data from Yelp, Uber and Expedia, as well as over 100 other domains such as weather, stocks, sports, local businesses, flights, hotels, mortgage, and even interactive games. Houndify also provides a large number of domains specifically targeted for the automotive industry.
More than 60,000 partners have registered on the Houndify platform since its launch in December 2015 and more than 1,000 distinct products are being Houndified. Strategic partners include Hyundai Intelligent Personal Agent, Hyundai’s new voice-enabled virtual assistant system powered by Houndify, Samsung ARTIK Smart IoT platform and NVIDIA, which brings Houndify’s large vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding to cars even without cloud connection by utilizing NVIDIA GPUs. Other Houndify partners include an integration in Sharp’s RoBoHoN® platform, Rand McNally, which uses the company’s voice technology in its OverDryve™ connected car device; a collaboration with Onkyo, to develop and market a next-generation series of smart speakers powered by Houndify; and 11 car makers around the world. At CES in January, SoundHound Inc. announced several integrations of its Houndify platform into various products such as HUMAX speakers, Kuri robots by Mayfield Robotics, BUNN Sure Immersion coffee machines and PhotoSpring Digital Photo Frame.
Developers interested in exploring the Houndify platform can visit Houndify.com to learn more and register. The Hound voice search and assistant app is available as a free iOS or Android app, and can be downloaded via SoundHound.com/Hound.
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, and every other part of the emerging ‘connected’ world. Our consumer product, Hound, leverages our Speech-to-Meaning™ and Deep Meaning Understanding™ technologies to create a groundbreaking smartphone experience, and is the first product to build on 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. Through the Houndify platform, we aim to bring voice-enabled AI to everyone and enable others to build on top of it. We call this Collective AI. Our Mission: Houndify everything.
About Acapela Group:
Acapela Group, a leading voice solutions player, creates voices for everything from tiny toys to server farms, AI, accessible screen readers, robots, transit systems, smartphones, and more. Acapela’s in-house speech technologies provide a smart and pleasant spoken audio result in more than 34 languages and accents, and even custom voices. More information is at: acapela-group.com.
