SoundHound Launches Houndify Platform For Voice-Activating Your Apps

song-reputation app company SoundHound launched Hound back in June as a Siri competitor, a verbal assistant able to process complicated questions. additionally they quietly began letting users test out the beta version of Houndify, the voice activation and natural language processing expertise that Hound uses, for companies to try out with their own merchandise. Now after six months of tinkering, SoundHound is launching Houndify as a full platform.

need Siri-style voice keep watch over on your app? Houndify’s API allows you to do this, so you don’t have to provide you with your personal tech. When Hound launched, SoundHound founder and CEO Keyvan Mohajer mentioned the corporate had been experimenting with voice attractiveness for just about a decade. the usage of Houndify to energy Hound was an intentional transfer to point out self assurance within the expertise, says Mohajer, and prove that they’d simplest liberate a product that they’d use themselves.

He claims that Houndify’s all-in-one functionality—”if you want a espresso computing device that solutions questions about the weather or the inventory market”—stands out with the aid of allowing product makers to mix voice acceptance, voice-to-textual content, and common command and control to turn on and off by means of voice. so as to get the climate or inventory guidelines, developers can plug into Houndify’s platform components. SoundHound bought a few companies to donate their API knowledge to Houndify, including big names like Expedia and AccuWeather.

This makes the Houndify platform a bit of of a marketplace. it is prepared by using “domains,” programs that offer users with relevant data or movements associated to their queries—so Expedia stands out as the first area beneath “go back and forth.” developers can construct their own domains within the hopes that people will choose theirs, netting the area developer money will have to they make a decision to cost.

however Houndify needs to draw builders first to fill its domain marketplace. To entice them, SoundHound is releasing tool construction kits (SDKs) for a wide array of platforms: iOS, Android, windows, Unix, Java, and Raspberry Pi, with extra anticipated.

“Our mission will also be summarized in two phrases: Houndify everything. Voice interface will coexist with contact and keyboard, however more and more issues will not have a slightly display, and that you may simplest speak to them,” says Mohajer.

Houndify’s value variation is in line with utilization: you pay for the information requests your users make in the app that you’ve got adapted. There’s a free tier so as to mostly benefit tinkering developers whose testers are making only a few requests, whereas the most cost effective tier is $9 a month.

when you bake Houndify into your app or provider, it’s easy to replace new actions and data into it. by means of switching on more domains, customers can get get right of entry to to new commands and data instantly.

“when we began to make Houndify, we came up with the following problem observation: We wanted a platform that’s easy to analyze and simple to use via developers who will not be essentially scientists in [the voice control and natural language processing] box,” says Mohajer, who provides that he is employed new college grads with no experience in speech recognition or AI, but who began contributing to the platform within days.