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Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

houndify.com

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Re: Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

#24
post #8
post #5

You're probably skeptical (as I was) but watch this video demo of the Hound app: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg That's insanely fast, compound natural language queries. I'm impressed.

Maybe answers are spoken a bit too fast but that speed makes the demo more impressive.

Just like how I listen to all of my podcasts between 1.8 and 2.2x I would want my phone's spoken responses to default to a high speed.

Re: Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

#26

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?

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.

Re: Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

#27
post #18

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

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

Google does say what they will do with those searches: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse

Re: Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

#28
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.

Re: Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

#29
post #7

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 ju…

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.

Re: Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

#30
post #2

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.

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.

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.

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