One of our perks here at appchoose had been playing around with hound on various devices including a Blackberry Z10. Wait haven't you heard of it yet! Its a virtual assistant app from Soundcloud, the company behind the well-known music recognition app with the same name. It seems to be an app with a huge potential that promises to give Google Now, Siri, and Cortana a run for its money. Though the sound seems to be more towards the robotic side compared to google now and siri. The questions it answers will be sure to impress you.

Nine years in the making, Hound generated positive reactions in the tech press, but without a real hands-on demonstration, it’s hard to understand what the fuss is all about. Well, SoundHound delivered and this video called “Hound internal demo” suggests the hype is entirely deserved.


In case you can’t watch the video, the user asks questions like “What is the population and capital for Japan and China and their area in square miles and square kilometers and also tell me how many people live in India and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” and "Show me hotels in miami with availability monday staying three nights between one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty dollars that have a pool and are pet friendly." And Hound begins answering instantly, without skipping a beat.

The provided results, if accurate, are more informative than the general search Google dishes out. The ability for Hound to respond to follow-up questions, such as "Only show ones that are open past 9pm," shows that SoundHound is trying is darndest to out-Google Google. Considering the company has spent years listening to lyrics and matching them with songs, it's in a good position to try.

Being a blackberry 10 user, curiosity got the better of us. The results we got on z10 were the best among all the devices we tested. It did fairly well when tested with an android device, but the quality of voice recogonition we got from the Z10 were extraordinary. Some questions we asked on some of our android devices required us to ask the question repeatedly 3 or 4 times to get an answer but the same questions when asked on the Z10; was understood at one go.
There's one more thing, Hound won’t understand everything you say. Hound can provide the weather, pull up directions, and translate words. It's also capable of searching for news, photos, video, and all kinds of mundane but useful information. It allows users to even play interactive games which is simply great!

You can try it for yourself from play store here. Or if are a blackberry loyalist you can get the apk from here. Let us know how it fared on your device via the comments section below!

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