Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

houndify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 53 posts

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

#41

Post by doragcoder »

pbreit wrote: 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.

I think voice with a screen is interesting, but voice alone can be difficult. What is the last voice controlled IVR (phone system) that was awesome to interact with. I think it takes a combination of voice and something can can be confirmed with another "button", or something you can touch or push to confirm or cancel what you've "asked" it to do.

I think it can augment things well, but not be the prime time star.

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

#42

Post by pbreit »

doragcoder wrote: post #41
pbreit wrote: 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.

I think voice with a screen is interesting, but voice alone can be difficult. What is the last voice controlled IVR (phone system) that was awesome to interact with. I think it takes a combination of voice and something can can be confirmed with another "button", or something you can touch or push to confirm or cancel what you've "asked" it to do. I think it can augment things well, but not be the prime time star.

You should try out Echo. It works fine without a screen.

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

#43

Post by hobonumber1 »

thejosh wrote: post #4

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.

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

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

#45

Post by pmontra »

transpy wrote: post #29
pmontra wrote: 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.

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.

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

#49

Post by iamcasen »

Donald wrote: post #46
hobonumber1 wrote: post #44

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

Any chance for an invite, or should we just use https://www.houndify.com/verify-invite ?

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.

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

#50

Post by wutbrodo »

gregpilling wrote: post #30
wutbrodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post reply on HN