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Comment by dshankar | Hacker News Reader

You're probably skeptical (as I was) but watch this video demo of the Hound app: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg

That's insanely fast, compound natural language queries. I'm impressed.

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The video is only 240p and quite shaky. As it is published by the SoundHound Inc. company, is this a marketing technique to make it look more amateurish?

Such a low latency means the demo was done over Wifi in the SoundHound building - especially if the speech recognition runs on the server side. Or which speech recognition software does that demo app use? Nuance software based on the client? Android 5 voice recognition isn't that fast.

> As it is published by the SoundHound Inc. company, is this a marketing technique to make it look more amateurish?

yes, if you don't scroll down it looks like it's some users demonstration of it.

I’ve tested the app on dial-up internet, and it answers almost immediately.

So the question where the speech recognition happens isn’t easily answered.

How did you get invited? I'd love to test the app. With Natural Language we should be skeptical as long as all we have are canned demos.

You might be able to try signing up here:

http://www.soundhound.com/hound#!

Maybe answers are spoken a bit too fast but that speed makes the demo more impressive.

It feels like the video is sped up ever so slightly. Even the user is talking pretty quick.

Just like how I listen to all of my podcasts between 1.8 and 2.2x I would want my phone's spoken responses to default to a high speed.

It got the Space Needle question wrong. It gave the answer for DC rather than Seattle.

"the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located"

ah, oops.

Guess it has better speech recognition than you do ;)

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