LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SoundHound Inc.®, the leading innovator in sound recognition and voice search technologies, today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to create a large-vocabulary, hybrid voice and natural language understanding interface for in-vehicle infotainment systems that is based on deep learning.
The solution uses the fastest and most efficient Speech Recognition Engine from Houndify, the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, and SoundHound Inc.’s patented technologies for running dual mode speech recognition simultaneously in the cloud and in the embedded system.
With the Houndify integration, drivers can interact with more than 100 domains, programs that provide users with relevant information or actions related to their queries. These include, among other applications: directions, weather, stock prices, sports scores, flight status, local business searches, and hotel searches with complex criteria. They can also control a car’s systems, such as heating/cooling, rolling the windows up and down, playing music, or accessing a phone.
“Our mission is ‘Houndify Everything’: to add a smart, voice-enabled, conversational interface to every technology that humans interact with,” said Keyvan Mohajer, Founder and CEO, SoundHound Inc. “Enabling drivers to interact with their cars using voice and natural language is extremely compelling and increases safety and productivity. Key to this ability are NVIDIA GPUs used for deep learning training, and the DRIVE CX platform, with its powerful GPU for embedded computation. We are able to run Houndify’s Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding in the car on DRIVE CX, even without a cloud connection.”
SoundHound Inc. recently launched Houndify™, the world’s most advanced developer platform that enables anyone to seamlessly create a smart, voice-enabled, conversational interface. Houndify enables developers to revolutionize their products and services by easily adding voice search and voice control to their apps and devices while delivering a natural conversational user experience. Some partner companies – including Expedia, AccuWeather, Sportradar, Xignite, FlightStats, and Open Exchange Rates – are providing their own data and APIs to the Houndify platform, so developers can integrate with their services. These domains are already integrated within the DRIVE CX platform.
NVIDIA provides end-to-end deep learning solutions for both the cloud and in-vehicle applications. A single architecture enables deep neural networks to be trained in the datacenter, and then deployed in the car for various applications from autonomous driving to natural language processing. The company has provided in-vehicle infotainment and digital cockpit technology to more than 10 million cars on the road today, and is a leader in automotive technology for self-driving cars.
The DRIVE CX platform enables advanced navigation and infotainment, high-resolution digital instrument clusters, natural speech processing, and image processing for driver assistance. This is the ideal platform for integrating the unprecedented voice technology that Houndify can provide, enabling the vehicle to respond intelligently to human voice commands.
“Using NVIDIA’s GPUs and deep learning technology, Houndify has demonstrated great progress in enabling fast speech recognition technology, even when disconnected from the Internet,” said Rob Csongor, vice president and general manager of Automotive, NVIDIA. “Using deep learning, the system is able to rapidly understand complex natural language queries while supporting a large and growing number of search categories.”
Known publicly as the company behind SoundHound, the music search, discovery and play app with more than 280 million unique downloads globally, SoundHound Inc. has been in stealth mode with its voice technology and natural language understanding research and development over the last decade. The company has quietly been building the technology ingredients needed to create a product that elegantly enables fast and accurate voice search when people speak naturally, and the platform that enables developers to use that technology in their own products. The first application to showcase the Houndify platform is SoundHound Inc.’s own voice search and assistant app, Hound, which launched in private beta in June 2015. The Houndified DRIVE CX platform is being showcased this week to automakers at CES.
Developers interested in exploring the Houndify platform can visit www.houndify.com to sign up and learn more. Additional information on NVIDIA Automotive solutions can be found by visiting http://www.nvidia.com/drive
About SoundHound Inc.:
SoundHound Inc. turns sound into understanding and actionable meaning. We believe in enabling humans to interact with the things around them in the same way we interact with each other: by speaking naturally to mobile phones, cars, TVs, music speakers, coffee machines, and every other part of the emerging ‘connected’ world. Our consumer product, Hound, leverages our Speech-to-Meaning technology to showcase a groundbreaking smartphone experience, and is the first product to leverage and showcase the Houndify platform. Our SoundHound product applies our technology to music, enabling people to discover, explore, and share the music around them, and even find the name of that song stuck in their heads by singing or humming. And through the Houndify platform, we empower developers to be part of the Speech-to-Meaning revolution. Mission: Houndify everything.
