1. Apps Like Soundhound
2. Shazam Vs Soundhound

SoundHound Inc. is an audio and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include Houndify, a Voice AI developer platform, Hound, a voice-enabled digital assistant, and music recognition mobile app SoundHound. The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.^[2]

History[edit]

The company was founded in 2005 by Keyvan Mohajer, an Iranian-Canadian computer scientist who had founded a number of dot com ventures before starting SoundHound.^[3][4]

1. The two newest and powerful contenders in the apps market are― SoundHound by SoundHound, Inc., Shazam by Shazam Entertainment Ltd. Buzzle’s comparison highlights the best buy between the two, especially for crazy music lovers. For more information on these apps, click the links given below.
2. Shazam seems to have better consistency recognizing songs. It will usually recognize them faster and may pick up some more obscure songs. SoundHound has a great feature where you can hum or sing to the phone and it'll recognize it.
3. SoundHound Top Songs. Powered by Houndify. Our Speech-to-Meaning™ engine delivers unprecedented speed and accuracy, while our Deep Meaning Understanding™ technology allows users to ask multiple questions and filter results all at once. With custom wake words and custom domains, you maintain your brand and you keep your customers.

In 2009, the company's Midomi app was rebranded as SoundHound but is still available as a web version on midomi.com.^[5] In 2012, SoundHound announced it had over 100 million users globally.^[6] In 2014, SoundHound became the first music-search product available as a wearable.^[7]

In 2015, SoundHound became the first music recognition service shipping in autos, in a partnership with Hyundai, in the new Genesis model.^[8]

According to me Shazam is the best among both, Curiously enough, SoundHound / Midomi don't (quite amazing, as my earlier attempts - some 2 to 3 years ago, I think, to ID some of my Baroque Music collection - I think I used either Shazam or Sound.

By May 2016, SoundHound had over 300 million users globally.^[9]

In 2018, SoundHound Inc. announced partnerships with Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Honda to provide voice interaction for their products using its Houndify voice AI platform.^[10][11][12]

SoundHound won the 2020 Webby Award for Productivity (Voice) in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice.^[13] In June of that year, the company announced partnerships with Snap Inc. as the technology behind Voice Scan in the Snapchat app, and Mastercard to voice-enable their new Drive Through solutions.^[14][15]

Funding[edit]

According to an article of June 2015 SoundHound Inc. had raised a total of $40 million in funding from Global Catalyst Partners, Translink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, and other investors.^[16] This included $7 million in a Series B funding round the company secured in October 2008, bringing total funds raised to $12 million at this time. The round was led by TransLink Capital with the participation of JAIC America and Series A investor Global Catalyst Partners. In 2009 it attracted additional funding from Larry Marcus at Walden Venture Capital, who had previously invested in music startups Pandora and Snocap. The $4 million funding round was led by Walden Venture Capital VII, with the participation of an unnamed device manufacturer.^[17]

In January 2017, the company raised another $75 million in an investment round that included Nvidia, Samsung, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and others.^[18]

Announced in May 2018, SoundHound raised $100 million from a funding round led by Tencent and joined by Daimler AG, Hyundai Motors, Midea Group, and Orange S.A.^[19] With this funding, the valuation of the company reached $1 billion.^[20]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'SoundHound Company Profile'. Craft. Retrieved November 21, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
2. ^May, Patrick (June 3, 2013). 'Siri's got nothing on SoundHound's new app'. The Mercury News. Retrieved March 1, 2016.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^Keyvan Mohajer on CrunchBase
4. ^'Keyvan Mohajer, Soundhound Inc: Profile and Biography'. Bloomberg.com. February 7, 2019. Retrieved December 2, 2020.
5. ^Rollison, Damian (January 27, 2010). 'Tune identifier SoundHound announces new version with Pandora, tour dates'. Venturebeat. Retrieved March 1, 2016.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
6. ^'SCREENVISION ACTIVATES SOUNDHOUND PARTNERSHIP TO CONNECT MOBILE MOVIEGOERS TO BIG SCREEN ADS | Screenvision'.
7. ^'SoundHound First Music Discovery Service to Be Live on Wearables | Business Wire'. www.businesswire.com. Retrieved June 5, 2015.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
8. ^'Hyundai and Kia tap SoundHound to help you identify music in your car'. Engadget. Retrieved June 5, 2015.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
9. ^'SoundHound now lets you use your voice to find music on the road | VentureBeat'.
10. ^'Hyundai Motor Collaborates with SoundHound Inc. to Develop 'Intelligent Personal Agent' Voice-Control Technology'. HYUNDAI MOTORS. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
11. ^'First-look into a new Infotainment System from Mercedes-Benz, MBUX, powered with voice-enabled AI from SoundHound Inc'. MBRDNA. September 14, 2018. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
12. ^'Honda R&D Innovations, Inc. | SoundHound Inc. and Honda Partner on Development of a Voice-Enabled AI Assistant'. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
13. ^Kastrenakes, Jacob (May 20, 2020). 'Here are all the winners of the 2020 Webby Awards'. The Verge. Retrieved May 22, 2020.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
14. ^'Snap Inc. Announces New Camera and Augmented Reality Experiences'. www.businesswire.com. June 11, 2020. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
15. ^'Mastercard Launches Frictionless Retail Technology Solutions to Enable Touchless Economy'. mastercardcontentexchange.com. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
16. ^Winkler, Rolf (June 2, 2015). 'SoundHound App Emerges to Take On Apple and Google in Voice Search'. Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on June 12, 2015. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
17. ^Wauters, Robin (August 25, 2011). 'Music Search Startup SoundHound Partners With Spotify For Instant Streaming'. TechCrunch. Retrieved March 1, 2016.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
18. ^Yeung, Ken (January 31, 2017). 'SoundHound raises $75 million to expand access to its Houndify voice-powered platform'. VentureBeat.com. VentureBeat. Retrieved January 31, 2017.
19. ^Lynley, Matthew (May 3, 2018). 'SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant'. TechCrunch. Retrieved September 21, 2018.
20. ^Schleifer, Theodore (January 24, 2018). 'SoundHound, once just a music-recognition app, is now a billion dollar company'. recode. Retrieved September 21, 2018.

External links[edit]

Apps Like Soundhound

SoundHound is no Shazam

According to a Grand View Research report, the global voice and speech recognition market is estimated to grow at 17% CAGR to $31.82 billion by 2025. The growth in the industry is expected to be driven by the adoption and development of AI-based technologies that leverage voice and speech recognition capabilities.

SoundHound’sOfferings

Santa Clara-based SoundHound was set up in 2005 by James Hom, Keyvan Mohajer, and Majid Emami. In its early days, SoundHound was best known for its app SoundHound, which was a close rival to Shazam. The music recognition app helped listeners identify the music and songs that they were listening to. But unlike Shazam, SoundHound did not stop at music. It also developed another technology in parallel. It launched its voice-AI developer platform called Houndify in March 2016.

Houndify was a natural language virtual assistant built off of its proprietary platform. Even in its early days, Houndify was known to be a faster and more accurate speech recognition tool than the likes of Siri, Google, and Cortana. Additionally, SoundHound also offers Hound, a voice-enabled digital assistant that leverages its Speech-to-Meaning technology to deliver a more natural smartphone experience.

Today SoundHound operates on a mission to want to “Houndify everything”. It wants to allow humans to interact with their devices such as mobile phones, TVs, music speakers, coffee machines, and other IoTs in the same way that they interact with other humans. It has been continuously improving its technology offerings. For instance, SoundHound now allows users to discover, explore, and share the music around them, and find songs that they are humming or singing but unable to name. Similarly, it is helping developers leverage voice recognition tools through the Houndify platform to build tools that use the speech-to-meaning revolution.

SoundHound’s Financials

SoundHound is privately held so far and has raised $215 million from investors including France Telecom, Daimler, Tencent Holdings, Midea Group, Hyundai Motor Company, RSI Fund, Nvidia GPU Ventures, MKaNN, Global Catalyst Partners, and Kleiner Perkins. Its last round of funding was held in May 2018 when it raised $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion. The round was of great importance as it allowed several tech players such as Midea, Tencent, Daimler, and Hyundai to invest in the company. These tech companies have since been able to leverage SoundHound’s capabilities in their own products. SoundHound has been using the funds for market expansion.

SoundHound may not be able to take on the likes of Alexa and Google, but by allowing technology companies to invest in its service, it is letting them use its product and is thus expanding its market reach. The company has shown great market resilience so far. Rival Shazam was sold off to Apple for a comparatively modest $400 million, and many suspected that SoundHound may also end a similar way. Instead, the company pivoted to becoming a successful Unicorn player in the voice recognition market.

Shazam Vs Soundhound

Photo: JD Lasica /Flickr