SoundHound Inc.®, the leading innovator in sound recognition and voice-enabled conversational intelligence technologies, today announced that its Houndify™ voice-enabling conversational intelligence developer platform now runs on a prototype of Sharp’s next generation RoBoHoN® platform. RoBoHon is a robotic smartphone platform that powers devices, including robots that walk on two legs, plus provides the environment to accommodate intelligence functions and service providers.

Houndify’s proprietary A.I. is integrated into RoBoHoN and learns from RoBoHoN’s users over time, to offer more natural communications and better understand each user’s needs. With the Houndify integration, RoBoHoN is enabled to allow users to speak to the device more naturally and receive flexible answers about a large number of domains, such as weather, sports, stocks, flights, hotels, restaurants, music, movies, and more. SoundHound Inc.’s proprietary SoundHound song recognition technology is also integrated into RoBoHoN, so users can easily identify any songs they hear and access deep music knowledge.

“Our goal when developing the Houndify platform was to create the world’s first fully agnostic voice and A.I. technology that allows anyone to easily add a voice-enabled, conversational interface to any app or device,” said Keyvan Mohajer, cofounder and CEO of SoundHound Inc. “We are incredibly excited to work with a legendary consumer electronics company such as Sharp, which has welcomed our proprietary technology into their robotic platform to bring their vision for connected devices like RoBoHoN to life.”

“We have been extremely impressed to see how users can interact with RoBoHoN like they do with an actual human through SoundHound’s built-in Houndify technology,” said Yoshisuke Hasegawa, President of the IoT Communication Business Unit of Sharp Corporation. “We expect both Houndify and SoundHound’s song recognition technologies to enrich our RoBoHoN platform’s overall user experience and solidify it as a must-have item for everyone from children to seniors.”

In 2015, SoundHound Inc. introduced the Houndify platform with the mission of bringing A.I. to everyone. About 20,000 partners signed up within a year, including Samsung, NVIDIA and Rand McNally, and hundreds of distinct products are being Houndified. Houndify is the only A.I. platform that is fully independent and platform-agnostic, which means business owners can deploy it anywhere and stay in control of their brand, users, and data, while differentiating and innovating.

Houndify provides all the technology ingredients, including very fast speech recognition, sophisticated natural language understanding, and easy to use developer tools. This gives Houndify unparalleled speed-to-market and the ability to scale, and includes an ever-expanding set of domains, which are programs that provide users with relevant information or actions related to their queries. The platform also provides access to knowledge and data from partners including Uber, Yelp, Expedia and more. Houndify is already featured in SoundHound Inc.’s mobile apps -- Hound, the voice search & assistant app, and SoundHound, the music search, discovery and play app -- making them hands-free and voice interface enabled.

Developers interested in exploring the Houndify platform can visit Houndify.com to learn more and register. The Hound voice search and assistant app is available as a free iOS or Android app, and can be downloaded at SoundHound.com/Hound.

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, 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. Through the Houndify platform, we empower developers to be part of the Speech-to-Meaning revolution. Our Mission: Houndify everything.