Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything

Any plans for other languages and locales? I immediately noticed the temperature in F in the example about the weather in Lima. I think everybody there uses C with the exception of American tourists :-) Seriously, it looks a great product. Maybe it returns even too much data in the JSON. I wonder how to take advantage of all of that if I don't know what people are going to ask. They're going to ask silly questions just for fun even if I have a vertical app (example: a mortgage calculator), because this is not a web form with constrained input fields but a free form input. The numbers I get into the answer could be unrelated to mortgages. Do you have examples of best practices? Maybe just write and speak the answer? Thanks.

You&#x27;re probably skeptical (as I was) but watch this video demo of the Hound app: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg</a><p>That&#x27;s insanely fast, compound natural language queries. I&#x27;m impressed.

After owning Echo, Roku and Fire TV, I&#x27;m super-bullish on voice commands finally being ready for prime time. It&#x27;s a terrific interface for home audio, TV and car audio.<p>I&#x27;ve gotta think Apple will open up Siri to app developers sooner than later.<p>Houndify looks interesting.

Privacy policy points out that the system sends voice recordings to Houndify but is totally silent on how they will be treated.

It&#x27;s already really easy to get fast, efficient access to large data sets. I don&#x27;t see much value in that. It is not fast,efficient, and easy to transform natural language queries into computationally actionable ones.<p>I would find more value as a developer if, when given a natural language query, it returned a structured query. Then I could tweak the query to conform to whatever data retrieval API I wanted.<p>I don&#x27;t think what I&#x27;m asking for has to be mutually exclusive with what they&#x27;re currently offering. Give me the option to have houndify do some or all of the work for me.

Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9650748" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9650748</a>.

I&#x27;ve been using pocketsphinx with this neat Ruby gem[1]. It&#x27;s really easy to use but has low accuracy (understands me correctly maybe half the time). I&#x27;m curious to see if Houndify does any better!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;watsonbox&#x2F;pocketsphinx-ruby" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;watsonbox&#x2F;pocketsphinx-ruby</a>

There is clearly a knowledge graph coupled with this in addition to the speech recognition. Sorry, &quot;meaning&quot; recognition. I feel like there is an opportunity to connect the deep knowledge graph of Wolfram Alpha -- or that maybe Wolfram missed the ball by not connecting their graph in a more usable way.

Acquisition by &lt;Google&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Facebook&gt; in 3... 2... 1...

Seems absofreakinglutely amazing. Congratulations to the team. Amazed that this isn&#x27;t front page everywhere yet.

Does this require a network connection? I&#x27;d love to start adding speech-to-text interfaces to my apps, but most of the stuff I work on needs to be able to work without the network, and most of the speech-to-text engines these days are SaaS products in some form or another.

I expect an acquisition announcement in about six days before the third Thursday in 2016.

Can&#x27;t Android Google voice keyboard be used as a speech-to-text interface and then the text can be used to trigger a command in a similar fashion?

This looks extremely cool and I can&#x27;t wait to try it.<p>Bug: When scrolling down the page it is very very sluggish, using Chrome on Xubuntu 15.04.

I&#x27;m one of the developers behind Houndify. Feel free to ask any questions.

The thing that least impresses me about this demo is the voice synthesis :)

I thought this was Apple-funded?