
Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything - scott_o
https://www.houndify.com/
======
pmontra
Any plans for other languages and locales? I immediately noticed the
temperature in F in the example about the weather in Lima. I think everybody
there uses C with the exception of American tourists :-) Seriously, it looks a
great product. Maybe it returns even too much data in the JSON. I wonder how
to take advantage of all of that if I don't know what people are going to ask.
They're going to ask silly questions just for fun even if I have a vertical
app (example: a mortgage calculator), because this is not a web form with
constrained input fields but a free form input. The numbers I get into the
answer could be unrelated to mortgages. Do you have examples of best
practices? Maybe just write and speak the answer? Thanks.

~~~
transpy
Nice observation. Sadly, localization is an afterthought for a lot of
developers. I am also curious to see how they handle other languages and
locales, since I'm interested in learning how to use these kinds of systems.

~~~
pmontra
To be fair, recognizing another spoken language is a much larger effort than
localizing a web site. I was curious to know if they have plans to move beyond
English, maybe next year or 2017.

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dshankar
You're probably skeptical (as I was) but watch this video demo of the Hound
app:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg)

That's insanely fast, compound natural language queries. I'm impressed.

~~~
frik
The video is only 240p and quite shaky. As it is published by the SoundHound
Inc. company, is this a marketing technique to make it look more amateurish?

Such a low latency means the demo was done over Wifi in the SoundHound
building - especially if the speech recognition runs on the server side. Or
which speech recognition software does that demo app use? Nuance software
based on the client? Android 5 voice recognition isn't that fast.

~~~
kuschku
I’ve tested the app on dial-up internet, and it answers almost immediately.

So the question where the speech recognition happens isn’t easily answered.

~~~
ar7hur
How did you get invited? I'd love to test the app. With Natural Language we
should be skeptical as long as all we have are canned demos.

~~~
superchink
You might be able to try signing up here:

[http://www.soundhound.com/hound#](http://www.soundhound.com/hound#)!

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pbreit
After owning Echo, Roku and Fire TV, I'm super-bullish on voice commands
finally being ready for prime time. It's a terrific interface for home audio,
TV and car audio.

I've gotta think Apple will open up Siri to app developers sooner than later.

Houndify looks interesting.

~~~
wutbrodo
Definitely. I've been using voice commands in Android for about 5 years now
(since ~2010) and I've consistently been shocked at how incredibly efficient
an interface it is. The number of capabilities hooked up to voice control has
only been increasing since then and it's been great.

~~~
gregpilling
I have been trying to use Android voice for five years and have been shocked
at how many words it completely mangles for me. Just completely wrong. This
has surprised me since I am Canadian, live in the USA and have a generic
American TV accent.

The failure rate is high enough that I rarely use the voice feature, despite
the fact I have problems with my hands that make typos a constant irritation.
I know I am just an anecdote - the strange thing is that my voice and lack of
accent should be the easiest thing for Android to navigate.

~~~
wutbrodo
Interesting. One of the things that immediately got me hooked was how well it
recognized my voice; That excitement has long since faded and now excellent
speech recognition is something I just take for granted that it does well.

Maybe try going into Settings > Voice on the Google search app and downloading
the voice pack for the version of English you think matches best? That's still
pretty weird though.

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pjc50
Privacy policy points out that the system sends voice recordings to Houndify
but is totally silent on how they will be treated.

~~~
dexterdog
And that's different from Google recording all of your searches how?

~~~
icebraining
Google does say what they will do with those searches:
[http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse](http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse)

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alistproducer2
It's already really easy to get fast, efficient access to large data sets. I
don't see much value in that. It is not fast,efficient, and easy to transform
natural language queries into computationally actionable ones.

I would find more value as a developer if, when given a natural language
query, it returned a structured query. Then I could tweak the query to conform
to whatever data retrieval API I wanted.

I don't think what I'm asking for has to be mutually exclusive with what
they're currently offering. Give me the option to have houndify do some or all
of the work for me.

~~~
iamcasen
I am one of the developers for houndify.com, so I can answer this question for
you!

We actually have an api endpoint dedicated to doing this for you. At the
moment we have a concept of "domains" where developers use a proprietary
language to help Hound understand topics. Using our api, you could technically
do this yourself, and add functionality that doesn't currently exist on the
platform.

You could use the hotel domain and get back a ton of pre-formatted data, or
you could just get back speech-to-text, or you could specify hooks you want to
take action on. I'm not a developer on the actual voice api itself, so I'm not
the most informed, but perhaps that answers your question?

~~~
alistproducer2
Q1: So a domain developer gets to determine what is returned to from the API
for all calls matched to that domain?

Q2: As a domain developer, where does the query-able content reside?

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dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9650748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9650748).

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egonschiele
I've been using pocketsphinx with this neat Ruby gem[1]. It's really easy to
use but has low accuracy (understands me correctly maybe half the time). I'm
curious to see if Houndify does any better!

[1] [https://github.com/watsonbox/pocketsphinx-
ruby](https://github.com/watsonbox/pocketsphinx-ruby)

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johnm1019
There is clearly a knowledge graph coupled with this in addition to the speech
recognition. Sorry, "meaning" recognition. I feel like there is an opportunity
to connect the deep knowledge graph of Wolfram Alpha -- or that maybe Wolfram
missed the ball by not connecting their graph in a more usable way.

~~~
frik
I wonder if it is based on Freebase.com knowledge graph, which Google
discontinued last month. [http://www.freebase.com/](http://www.freebase.com/)
(and recently IBM has bought Blekko web search and knowledge graph engine as a
replacement for Freebase to power their IBM Watson)

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davedx
Acquisition by <Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook> in 3... 2... 1...

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ilaksh
Seems absofreakinglutely amazing. Congratulations to the team. Amazed that
this isn't front page everywhere yet.

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moron4hire
Does this require a network connection? I'd love to start adding speech-to-
text interfaces to my apps, but most of the stuff I work on needs to be able
to work without the network, and most of the speech-to-text engines these days
are SaaS products in some form or another.

~~~
speechduh
Even if the speech-to-text doesn't, the natural language understanding does.

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philjackson
I expect an acquisition announcement in about six days before the third
Thursday in 2016.

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diminish
Can't Android Google voice keyboard be used as a speech-to-text interface and
then the text can be used to trigger a command in a similar fashion?

~~~
Freeboots
its the complexity of the queries, and the contextual awareness that makes it
impressive. But yes, my immediate thought was either Android s-to-t or google
speech api plugged into wolfram alpha might create a (much simpler, but also
much easier) version of this.

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thejosh
This looks extremely cool and I can't wait to try it.

Bug: When scrolling down the page it is very very sluggish, using Chrome on
Xubuntu 15.04.

~~~
hobonumber1
I'm one of the developers behind Houndify. Thanks for this feedback, I'll look
into it.

~~~
szermer
Really impressive work. Would love to play with the beta _cough_ invite
_cough_ ;-) Looking forward to seeing this being used on some inclusive design
projects.

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hobonumber1
I'm one of the developers behind Houndify. Feel free to ask any questions.

~~~
Donald
Any chance for an invite, or should we just use
[https://www.houndify.com/verify-invite](https://www.houndify.com/verify-
invite) ?

~~~
iamcasen
If you have an android, we can definitely get you an invite. Not sure if
hacker news has a PM system though. Not sure if you wanna publish your email
in here.

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amelius
The thing that least impresses me about this demo is the voice synthesis :)

~~~
cscharenberg
It is surprising how that has lagged behind. I haven't noticed any significant
improvement for several years in the voice synthesis on Android.

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ilaksh
I thought this was Apple-funded?

