SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SoundHound Inc.®, the leading innovator in voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies, today announced a partnership with Wcities, the travel and entertainment content publisher specializing in city guides and event aggregators, to bring location-based events data to the Houndify™ voice AI platform. With the new Wcities event search domain, developers using Houndify will have access to information on more than 3 million events across 150 categories (including sports, concerts, festivals and shows), in over 20,000 cities worldwide. They can include this information in their apps and services via Wcities’ eventseeker™ APIs.
Houndify domains are programs that provide data and content for a natural and fully conversational interface on specific topics, without requiring users to memorize and use the specific phrasing of hard-coded commands or skills. With the Wcities domain, users will be able to use simple and detailed voice queries to find out what is happening around them.
Sample queries for the Wcities domain include:
- “What is there to do around here?”
- “Show concerts on the east side this week.”
- "What teams are playing downtown tonight and what time does the game start?”
- “Who is playing at the Apollo Theater tonight?”
- “What exhibits are at the Met this weekend?”
- “Who is playing at Coachella this year?”
- “Are there any food festivals happening this month?”
Houndify also enables users to ask follow-up questions, ensuring that the conversation is seamless and continuous. For example, users can ask to play the music of an artist performing in their neighborhood tonight. Other Houndify domains include weather, sports, music search, as well as Yelp, Expedia, and Uber.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Wcities to bring their extensive list of event and location-based data to the Houndify platform,” said Kamyar Mohajer, VP of Corporate Strategy and International Expansion at SoundHound Inc. “Gaining access to this trove of rich local content enables people to engage more deeply with the communities they live in and visit, in an easily accessible way through voice.”
“Our partnership with Houndify will allow us to connect more people with the events and content they love,” said Fraser Campbell, CEO, Wcities. “It enables us to deliver access to everything a city has to offer, all from the convenience of their mobile device, through their voice. They can filter easily to find exactly what they’re looking for, and even discover something new.”
Houndify’s technologies represent more than a decade of R&D and innovation by SoundHound Inc., resulting in unique advantages, making it the smartest and most accurate voice AI platform in the market. Houndify’s patented Speech-to-Meaning™ and Deep Meaning Understanding™ technologies deliver unprecedented speed and accuracy in voice recognition and responses, and an ability to understand context, such as the user's location or previous queries, to support more natural interactions. Another key advantage of Houndify is its architecture for collaborative intelligence called “Collective AI,” a powerful mechanism that facilitates collaboration among developers by enabling them to extend the functionality of existing knowledge domains. 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.
Developers interested in exploring the Houndify platform can visit Houndify.com to learn more and register for a free account.
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, apps, TVs, smart 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 App 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 Wcities:
Founded in 1998, Wcities is a travel and entertainment content publisher that specializes in providing personalized city guides and event coverage with a global scope. Wcities’ AI-powered content curation and recommendation platform delivers the most relevant data in these location-based domains. Our AI specializes in structuring millions of unstructured data points, deriving intelligence from them and targeting delivery to end consumers. Our consumer-facing products are cityseeker and eventseeker and are distributed across multiple platforms including mobile phones, car OEM’s, hotels, digital screens, and Inflight Entertainment (IFE). For more information please visit http://www.wcities.com or our consumer sites at http://www.cityseeker.com and http://www.eventseeker.com
