New virtual assistant Hound is hot on Siri’s trail

Watch out, Siri. There’s a hound on your trail, and it has some fast, formidable voice-recognition skills.

Hound — a new virtual-assistant from the tech startup that created the SoundHound music-ID mobile app — claims unprecedented speed and virtuosity for users who are tired of typing out queries on their smartphones.

It achieves this, according to SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer, with a proprietary “speech-to-meaning” technology that bypasses the “speech to text” algorithms used by virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

In some cases, the result can be a near-immediate and impressively detailed response to an intimidating question:

Q: “How old is the father of the mother of the President of the United States?”

A: Stanley Armour Dunham “would have been 97 years and 11 months now, if he were alive.”

Hound, however, didn’t have all the answers — for example, the age of the mother of Obama’s father, although it did summon her name, Habiba Akumu Obama.

Likewise, Hound got flummoxed by some seemingly simpler questions. “Who is Bruce Springsteen’s drummer?” didn’t yield a voiced answer, but it did pull up Max Weinberg’s Wikipedia page on the screen.

“It can learn very quickly. It’s getting better by the month,” says Mohajer, whose team in Santa Clara, Calif., has been building Hound for a decade.

The Stanford-trained engineer is especially proud of Hound’s ability to digest queries that are spoken relatively quickly, as well as follow-up questions. (“What’s the weather?” “How about tomorrow in Austin, Texas?”)

Like Siri and other virtual assistants, Hound learns by creating various “domains” for information — travel, sports, music, weather, restaurants, stock prices, foreign languages — and allowing developers to upload their data onto them.

Having recently struck partnerships with Expedia, Yelp and Uber, Hound can summon info on flight times, hotel rates, car fares and nearby restaurants with stunning efficiency.

Hound claims its developer platform, called “Houndify,” is more user-friendly than the others, giving it greater potential to amass a comprehensive database quickly while allowing companies to make their data searchable by voice.

Houndify customers include chipmaker Nvidia, which is using it to power its “Drive CX” platform for smart car dashboards; and Samsung, which is using it for the “Atrik” platform that powers its Internet of Things network.

Hound, however, lacks the sly charm of Siri. When told “I love you,” Hound responded, unconvincingly, “That makes me feel so special,” versus Siri’s “That’s sweet. But it’s not meant to be.”

And its impressive speed notwithstanding, Hound still has a few kinks to work out. Asked about the age of Martha Stewart, Hound responded that she died on Feb. 25, 2012 at the age of 89, apparently referring to a lesser-known actress and singer by the same name.

“She would have been 93 years and four months now, if she were alive,” according to Hound.