I wanted to take a quick look at the Hound Beta Search app from the maker of SoundHound. I was granted access to the beta for the past couple of weeks. I’ve actually been using it on and off for the past couple of weeks. And I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of a tour of the app and just show you how it works.
So upon booting up the app, it’s actually very simple and you will see a microphone button on the bottom ready to take voice commands right from the get-go. But this app can do a lot and it can give you a lot of information about hotels, weather, local information and points of interest as well as navigation. It can even control your phone and make phone calls, you can look up addresses of people in your contacts list. You can even send text messages using Hound Search. It goes on and on—alarms, calculators, nutrition, mortgage calculators to be specific; tip calculators, converters, even Wikipedia pages and flight statuses. It’s all here and you can access the information from those places on this app.
It’s a pretty ambitious app to say the least so I just want to go ahead and give you guys some samples of the voice commands to see how it does:
“Show me hotels in Portland, Oregon for the fourth of July weekend that have more than 4 stars.”
“What’s the weather?”
“Message Melissa: This is a test phone message. You will now be famous and all over the internet. I would also like to order an Iced Grande Soy Two…” (I always get that cut off.)
“How many calories are in two eggs and two whole-grain pancakes and two slices of bread?”
“What is the mortgage of a $1 Million home?”
“I want to play a game.”
It did a pretty good job once it let me ask the question in full. Sometimes, it would cut me off which was kind of frustrating and was almost too fast in that regard. But the point of this video isn’t really to review it so much for what it is now but just to show you guys what it has potential of and how it works and to gather some feedback on whether or not you would actually use this app and replace Google Now, Siri or Cortana.
Obviously it is a beta so it is not finalized yet but based off the questions, you can ask it now. And with its speed, it looks pretty promising. Now is it better than the competition? Well, until it’s official, it’s hard to say right now since I did run into several bugs but I do want to note that if you have an Android device, you can make Hound your default search engine or default app for voice commands which is pretty neat. If you guys would like to see me compare Hound Search with Siri, Cortana and Google Now, definitely let me know below in the comment.
