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You can now say ‘OK Hound’ in SoundHound to trigger voice searches

Julian Chokkattu
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SoundHound 8
Image used with permission by copyright holder
You’ve been able to tap to activate SoundHound’s song identification process for quite a while, but now you can find out what song is playing – and then some – with just your voice.

SoundHound Inc. wants to be the top voice assistant platform with Hound, an app it released earlier this year that functions like Amazon’s Alexa, and is more comprehensive than Google Now and Apple’s Siri. But before it released the Hound app, the company allowed developers to use its Houndify platform to integrate Hound’s speedy and eerily accurate voice assistant into their own apps.

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Naturally, to set an example and as a part of its mission to “Houndify everything,” the company has now added Hound’s voice search capabilities to its popular namesake app, SoundHound.

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Available in both the iOS and Android versions, it works similarly to the Hound app. As a natural language assistant, Hound app lets you do things like ask what the weather is, or execute more complex searches like, “Show me hotels in San Francisco for tomorrow, staying for two nights that cost me $200 and $300 a night, and are pet friendly and have a gym and a pool” — all with just your voice.

Translating those features to the SoundHound app, you can say “OK Hound” and follow up with “what’s this song” to find out what song is playing nearby. You can play and pause songs with just your voice, add a song to a Spotify playlist, search music charts around the world, and find out more about artists themselves.

You can also ask SoundHound to play music, and the app will fetch songs through a YouTube integration. If it doesn’t find it on YouTube, it will play a sample. On iOS, it will try to find a match in your iTunes library.

If you ran a search on a celebrity that wasn’t a musical artist, the app will try and link your voice search to some type of music-related song or individual. But if you wanted to know more about Taylor Swift, for example, SoundHound has the capability to fetch her age, top songs, and any other information you may like to know about her through a voice search.

Some command examples are: “OK Hound, what’s Jay-Z’s newest song;” “OK Hound, play Burn the Witch by Radiohead;” and “OK Hound, please add Famous to my Spotify playlist.”

“I really believe that you cannot believe a platform unless you have a killer product that is really good, that people see and use and love,” SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer told Digital Trends. “Otherwise the platform won’t be successful.”

SoundHound has undoubtedly seen a fair amount of success, now passing 300 million downloads. Hound and the Houndifying platform are just the next step for the company. In celebration of the announcement, the company is partnering with Awolnation and T-Pain to offer exclusive content and access you can unlock via the SoundHound app by using voice control.

The new Hound-ified version of SoundHound is available through an update to the Android and iOS app.

Download for iOS  Download for Android

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Julian Chokkattu
Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
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