AI Platform SoundHound Raises $100M in Funding
SoundHound Inc., a provider of voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies, has raised $100 million in new funding from a group of strategic investors.
SoundHound Inc. will use the new funding to drive adoption and distribution of its Houndify voice AI platform across verticals including automotive, Internet of Things, consumer products, and enterprise apps and services. The funding will accelerate global expansion, including new offices in China, France and Germany, in addition to furthering momentum in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea.
Houndify is an independent AI platform that allows developers and businesses to deploy a conversational interface while maintaining control of their brand and users. That control has become an increasingly important factor as companies may risk disintermediation if they integrate with technology companies that have popularized their own voice assistants. In addition, Houndify's comprehensive set of technologies and capabilities results in the most advanced and scalable voice AI available in the market for product integration. This includes speech recognition, sophisticated natural language understanding, developer tools, knowledge graphs, and a large and growing number of domains.
Domains are programs that provide a natural and fully conversational interface on specific topics, such as weather, sports, flights, restaurants and many more, that can be readily enabled in any product without requiring users to memorize and use the specific phrasing of hard-coded commands or skills.
Houndify technologies represent more than a decade of R&D and innovation by SoundHound Inc. SoundHound Inc.’s patented Speech-to-Meaning and Deep Meaning Understanding technologies deliver speed and accuracy in voice recognition and responses, and an ability to understand context, such as the user's location or previous queries, to support natural interactions. Houndify’s architecture enables collaborative intelligence called Collective AI that facilitates collaboration among developers by enabling them to extend the functionality of existing knowledge domains. This results in a global AI with comprehensive knowledge that is always learning, is crowdsourced to domain experts, and is larger than the sum of its parts.
More than 60,000 partners have registered on the Houndify platform since its launch in December 2015 and more than 1,000 distinct products are being powered by Houndify. At CES in January, SoundHound Inc. announced several integrations of its Houndify platform into various products,