SoundHound now includes “Apple Music - Listen Now” options on the homescreen and within song pages, which link to the Apple Music service. Once connected to the free three-month trial of Apple Music, users can stream music of artists discovered through SoundHound’s features including music identification, personalized History, Top Charts, or Music Maps.SoundHound is also showcasing Apple Music’s new global radio streaming station Beats 1. Users will see a “Beats 1 Radio” row within song pages, enabling easy, one-tap access to listen to the streaming radio broadcast, which features various artists hosting programs and full-time DJs, led by ex-BBC host Zane Lowe.
“SoundHound users are the most savvy and engaged music consumers in the world, and we know they will be delighted to have seamless access to Apple Music,” says Katie McMahon, Vice President and General Manager, SoundHound Inc.
This announcement follows the introduction of the SoundHound + LiveLyrics for Apple Watch. The new app allows Apple Watch users to initiate music recognition with one tap on the Watch, see LiveLyrics immediately display and scroll in-synch with the music, on the Watch display and simultaneously on the user’s iPhone. Its also possible to view collected songs by scrolling on the song history list, likewise synched with the user’s iPhone and iPad.
This announcements follow a series of innovations introduced by SoundHound since early 2015, including the new Hound speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies. Hound is a mobile voice interface, downloadable as an app, which gives users the ability to speak naturally and get deep results to what they ask for, such as looking up the weather, placing a phone call, sending a text message, finding a hotel that matches their detailed criteria, navigating to an address, finding their flight status, checking the stock market, searching and playing music, and even playing interactive games.
While older voice services use word and phrase detection to generate search results, Hound combines voice recognition and natural language understanding in real-time to deliver the fastest and most accurate results seen on Android and iOS mobile voice services to-date. SoundHound has been in stealth mode with its voice technology research and development over the last decade, quietly building the technology ingredients and a product that elegantly solves the challenge of enabling fast and accurate voice search when people speak naturally.
Hound features the ability to handle complex, natural language sentences, including compound criteria, exclusions and negation. This empowers users to speak more naturally, and be more detailed and specific, versus speaking in key-word fragments.
The ability to evolve more rapidly through SoundHound’s new developer platform, Houndify, allows rapid development cycles, inclusion of new domains, and the ability to scale faster than traditional voice technology solutions, alternative to typing, tapping and swiping.
Global online travel brand Expedia.com is among Hound’s launch partners, whose real-time pricing and amenities for hotels around the world surfaces when a user Hounds for a hotel, by saying, for example, “show me pet-friendly hotels near the Golden Gate Bridge, with three or more stars under $200, excluding bed and breakfast.”
The Houndify platform is operating system-agnostic and simple for developers to use and enables them to leverage SoundHound Hound Speech-to-Meaning technology across all major platforms. This means that innovators across major industries such as automotive, retail, quick-serve restaurants, consumer electronics, entertainment, finance, and medical devices, as well as individual developers who build mobile apps, can leverage the technology behind Hound. Once integrated with the voice interface capability, their respective product, service or experience becomes Houndified.
www.soundhound.com
