Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by kuschku » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #19

dshankar wrote: 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.

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 recognit…

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.

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

#32

Post by ar7hur » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #31

frik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recognit…

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.

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.

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

#33

Post by cscharenberg » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #22

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

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

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

#34

Post by moron4hire » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

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.

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

#35

Post by egonschiele » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

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

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

#36

Post by iamcasen » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

alistproducer2 wrote: post #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 t…

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?

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

#37

Post by ilaksh » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 6:14 PM UTC

I thought this was Apple-funded?

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

#38

Post by ilaksh » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 6:16 PM UTC

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

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

#39

Post by speechduh » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 6:21 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #34

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.

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

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

#40

Post by superchink » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 6:34 PM UTC

ar7hur wrote: post #32

kuschku wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You might be able to try signing up here:

http://www.soundhound.com/hound#!