SoundHound wants to offer voice A.I. tools to manufacturers and they seem intent on competing with the likes of Google and Amazon. While SoundHound is mostly known for their music search software that can be found in an app by the same name, they’ve recently raised about $75 million for research and development in voice-based artificial intelligence technology. Their plan is to create something that they can offer to third-parties which are looking into building products that are integrated with something similar to Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. Instead of manufacturers developing their own technology, SoundHound wants manufacturers to use whatever they come up with.
A big part of how SoundHound aims to convince companies to use their technology instead of competing services from companies like Google and Amazon is with data. SoundHound’s CEO Keyvan Mohajer notes that companies will be able to keep the data that’s collected from users interacting with their products if they use SoundHound’s A.I. software, whereas going with an option like Amazon’s Alexa software requires an Amazon account login and all of that collected data goes back to Amazon’s servers. The company already has a speech recognition engine called Houndify that it uses to power its music search app as well as Hound, their digital assistant app, and now with fresh capital at their disposal they plan to build out and expand on the technology to make it smarter and more capable for use in connected IoT devices.
While SoundHound may not be as large of a company as its competitors who are already offering technology of the same kind, they do have investments from large brands. Samsung and NVIDIA are both reportedly part of the most recent round of funding that SoundHound received, and they have worked with both Samsung and NVIDIA before to incorporate their software into hardware from both companies. Aside from large company investments and the promise of letting companies keep the data collected from users, the speech software itself aims to offer fast results to users. This is all made possible by interpreting the words from users as they speak them in real-time instead of waiting for the user to finish what they’re saying before kicking back a response. With SoundHound’s unique approach to voice A.I. and IoT devices gaining in popularity with more and more consumers, the company just might be a worthy competitor to larger offerings.