SoundHound, has raised a further $75 million in a new investment round for Houndify.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – SoundHound, has raised a further $75 million in a new investment round. This will be invested in the development of Houndify, an AI-powered conversational platform.
SoundHound Inc was founded back in 2005. It is an audio cognition and recognition company. It is based in Santa Clara, California. The company is perhaps best known for its SoundHound app.
This works as a vocal recognition tool. The app has also grown significantly since its release. Estimates show that it has more than 300 million users. 2015 saw the release of two new company products.
One of them is Houndify. This latter is a voice-enabled developer platform. The same year saw the launch of Hound. This later is a voice-powered assistance. It works on both the Android and iOS platform. Now, SoundHound is looking to further develop its conversational platform.
The company has just announced the end of a new funding round. Through it, it has managed to raise a further $75 million. These will complete the already raised amount. A previous funding round brought in $40 million.
According to reports, these will have a specific target. SoundHound is looking to develop a collective, AI-powered conversational platform. The company started out with a simple voice recognition app. But Keyvan Mohajer has bigger plans.
He is the SoundHound CEO. The company was looking to develop an established voice-based AI. This should be able to answer increasingly more complex sentences. And also learn from the previous ones. This would also allow for more specific, targeted questions.
Hound users have the chance to try out this system. They can surpass asking follow-up questions. Instead, they should directly ask a longer one. And the question’s length could continue increasing.
According to Mohajer, this increase is possible thanks to software improvements. Hound should be able to understand more than one data point. And these can be within the same query.
Houndify has also advanced exponentially. And this latest funding round should help accelerate its increase. The company has now amassed about $115 million.
The capital will be used in trying to accelerate the AI-based Houndify. It will also be used in its international expansion strategy. The company is looking to expand its outreach in the European and Asian markets.
Houndify was designed with quite a specific purpose. It is meant to provide developers with their needed tools. These should help develop and integrate AI and voice technologies.
SoundHound considers voice controls as a future technology. It expects an explosion of the need for such capabilities. Especially as the number of Internet-connected devices keeps growing.
According to Mohajer, we are at an “inflection point”. Almost all services and products may come to require a smart voice enabled interface. And at the same time, users will also be expecting more. They will have higher expectations. These will go beyond simple skills and commands.
The SoundHound Houndify platform offers a “Collective AI” architecture. This enables the developers’ ease of access. The resulting AI will have a comprehensive knowledge database. And it will also keep on learning. It will also be crowdsourced. And will also have access to domain experts.
Presently, Houndify provides access to data and knowledge from over 100 domains. These include popular services such as Expedia, Uber, and Yelp. And generally, on weather, flights, stocks, and others.
Thanks to the latest funding rounds, SounHound is planning to expand this platform. Reports show that Houndify is already embedded in over 500 distinct products. These range from appliances to cars.
It also has over 20,000 registered developers that can access the platform.
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