Siri, Cortana and Google Have Nothing On SoundHound's Speech Recognition

MojoKid writes: Your digital voice assistant app is incompetent. Yes, Siri can give you a list of Italian restaurants in the area, Cortana will happily look up the weather, and Google Now will send a text message, if you ask it to. But compared to Hound, the newest voice search app on the block, all three of the aforementioned assistants might as well be bumbling idiots trying to outwit a fast talking rocket scientist. At its core, Hound is the same type of app — you bark commands or ask questions about any number of topics and it responds intelligently. And quickly. What's different about Hound compared to Siri, Cortana, and Google Now is that it's freakishly fast and understands complex queries that would have the others hunched in the fetal position, thumb in mouth. Check out the demo. It's pretty impressive.

Comments

Yes, but can it launch Waze

[Overzeetop]

Or does it just stare at you stupidly because using ways to give you directions means nothing if it doesn't recognize the homophone.

Google's send a text was useless.

[pecosdave]

I tried sending a text with Google's voice engine last week just to try it out. It did a very good job of taking my dictation to text, then it asked if I wanted to send. I said yes. It spelled out yes in it's little window, then asked again, I said yes again, I tried other words, it also recognized those words, and every time asked me if I wanted to send, while recognizing the words. I finally reached over and hit the send button.

Re:Google's send a text was useless.

[Overzeetop]

It also only works with casual conversation.

I tried replying to a work text with something like "It's okay to use a W12x14 in place of the C section. Just make sure that it's AISC A992 grade 50" What came out was unusable, while "yo, bitch, put the dinner on the table I'll be home in 5" was transcribed verbatim. Thank goodness I had the same problem with voice send or I would have been picking up McDonalds on my way to sleep with the dog.

Actually, it really needs to automatically read it back to you, otherwise you have to read what it typed - and that defeats the purpose of being voice activated if you're driving.

Last time was a CON GAME as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people have the memory of a goldfish, but I don't. last time such a bizarre voice recognition break-through was claimed, the con went like this. A company arranged for a bunch of HUMAN listeners to sit in front of a network of computer screens, and the calls made that were supposed to experience MACHINE voice to text transcribing were actually processed the old fashioned way- dictating to a person.

The company invited people to phone its special number, and receive an email with the transcription of their message, 'proving' the astonishing efficiency of their 'algorithms'. It had a MASSIVE promotion on Slashdot at the time, but Slashdot never bothered with the follow up exposing it as a con (surprise, surprise).

Such cons are about sucking in massive amounts of VENTURE CAPITAL- frequently from il--informed idiots from the Middle East with more (oil) money than sense.

Kickstarter shows how lame and hopeless ideas pushed by people with near zero skills can raise astonishing amounts of money, if the fantasy appeals to nerds enough. Here's a clue for the clueless. Google is actually the R+D arm of the NSA. In the areas where Google excels, what it does best CANNOT be beaten significantly at any given moment in time. Anyone claiming otherwise can safely be dismissed as a LIAR.

Incremental improvements, and identifying fertile grounds for future research are a different issue, of course. But if you can't smell a con like this a mile off (and with that earlier con, using Humans not computers, I guessed the con the moment I read about it here) you really lack the ability to ever apply sanity tests to the 'facts' of a given situation.

Re:Holy shit

[Bosconian]

The only thing MojoKid (1002251) wrote for this submission was "Check out the demo. It's pretty impressive," while the rest was plagiarized from the "Hothardware" article written by Paul Lilly, who does seems to be breathlessly impressed by an internal demo of an unreviewed application.

I'm going to call this a formatting error and a sad omission of credit, because I refuse to believe that someone would shamelessly lift words that they hadn't written and posit them as their own. Maybe it's the editors' fault. In either case, it's sloppy posting and comes off as skeezy no matter what the excuse might be.

Hell, just submit the rest of the article next time - why bother linking to a source or crediting an original author?

yes but did you listen to the video?

[goombah99]

Holy crap the video is impressive. It clearly parses phrased and dependent logical statements like " what is the population of the capitol of the country in which the space needle is located. " It alos parsed paragraph long multi-part questions. I was floored.

As for homophones, how do you (human) recognize them. Well you parse the logical context. If you are doing single word dictation homophones will always be a problem but for queries there's context. And the demo shows this thing can handle some staggering conditional contexts and long phrases. So I would guess that if your query is not ambiguous in the use of the word Waze, then this thing is approachi8ng a level where it will indeed get the right homophone.