There are many forms of digital assistant today: iOS has Siri, Android has Google Now, and Windows Mobile has Cortana. Hound, on the other hand, is arguably better than these options, and it is now available on Android and iOS.
What makes Hound better than other digital assistants is its speed, among other things. Apparently, many are saying that Hound is even faster than both Siri and Google Now, which is rather impressive. According to The Verge, Hound “can produce near real-time translations of whole sentences in other languages.”
The speed of Hound is just one of its unique features; it is also arguably smarter than Google Now and Siri. While other digital assistants stumble when you ask them “a question within a question,” Hound can understand what you’re asking and give you results within seconds; Hound also remembers what you said, so you can ask it follow-up questions.
That being said, Hound isn’t perfect: the app gets information from its own “knowledge-graph,” and doesn’t rely on Google. Because of this, Hound may not know how to answer every question you throw at it. And if it doesn’t understand you, it will perform a search with Microsoft’s Bing. Of course, these issues will probably be solved over time, but it still won’t have access to sensitive information – such as your emails – on your device, which somewhat limits Hound’s usefulness. This isn’t an issue with tightly integrated digital assistants like Siri and Google Now.
Hound was made by the very same company behind SoundHound. For the past eight months, as many as 150 thousand testers had helped to improve the service to be as good as it is now. Keyvan Mohajer, the CEO of SoundHound, mentioned that the company has been working on Hound for nine years, and they knew that it was going to take that long.
At the time of this writing, it appears Hound is only available in the US. Hopefully, it will makes its way to Malaysian users sometime in the near future; an alternative to Google Now and Siri may just be what we need.
(Source: The Verge)
