SoundHound is known as a music discovery app that, like Shazam, lets consumers push a smartphone button while at a bar to see who's playing on the jukebox. It even spits out the lyrics in real time so the slightly inebriated can sing along.
But behind the scenes, the decade-old Silicon Valley start-up has been working on something that goes way beyond music.
SoundHound founder and CEO Keyvan Mohajer, who has a doctorate from Stanford University in speech recognition, wants to entirely change how we interact with our phones. (Tweet This)
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On Tuesday, the company pulled back the curtain on its technology that lets consumers use their voice to ask questions on just about any subject imaginable and get instant results. The app, called Hound, is being tested on the Android platform and will soon roll out on Apple iOS devices.
On the surface, it sounds like a niche start-up trying to take on Apple's Siri technology or Google voice search, but without the massive scale, distribution and engineering resources. There's some truth to that. SoundHound is only the 26th most popular free music app on the iPhone in the U.S., and it ranks 21st in the Google Play store, according to AppAnnie.