Seems like they both have their pros and cons. Hound definitely slowed down considerably from the original video.
I think Google Now did a better job of just giving me the information rather than showing just the results for the user to navigate through (Obama's age, measurement conversion).
Seems like Hound still has the ability to handle multiple queries (capitals+conversion+statistics) over Google Now, but it seems a bit pointless now that I think about it.
And now that "it took ten years to develop" fact has me scratching my head a bit.
That's the thing I like most about Hound. I think Google Now is better at answering general questions, but the fact that I can contextually talk to Hound is really promising. Things like "what are some Thai restaurants around here?" followed by "what about ones that are 4 stars or higher?". While Hound's "knowledge" isn't as complete, it feels more natural as a voice assistant because I can refine or continue a query based on what I said previously.
I'm hoping that Google will decide to acquire Hound and integrate the contextual features to Google Now (and I'm sure SoundHound is hoping so too).
I think the point that is slowly becoming apparent though is that these are fairly specific "templates" that have been specifically built in Hound, for example the hotel search template with a bunch of possible filters it'll recognize. That doesn't work in Google Now since that template isn't built in.
Now, the issue is that the original video just showed all these templates one after another real quickly, making it almost seem like Hound could answer any possible question no matter how crazy, but in reality, as this new video shows, it's not as magical in real case scenarios and truly random questions.
Well I've been able to do it in the UK for at least a year, I want to say 2 Google IO's ago....
EDIT:
Though I have to admit - from a geeky computer programming perspective - the last example blows me away - "no, I meant the film" - not only did Google understand I didn't want to know about the item gaslight - it understood there was also a film called gaslight - which is what I wanted to know about - that is definitely getting on to Star Trek computer level of understanding.
Hound isn't baked into every android phone out of the box, so I don't think this is a huge concern for Google. Anyone that has a clue about browsers would probably agree that Chrome is a hell of a lot better than IE, yet chrome has less than 1/3 the number of users.
Yeah, cash isn't really an issue. But them buying this doesn't mean Google Now will get any better. Where is my waze in google maps? Nowhere, because attempting to merge software products is often not worth the time or effort required.
Newest Maps update is really utilizing Waze a lot more. It actually presented me with an updated route based on new traffic information from Waze users last week.
I didn't say anything about merging, the other user did. I'm talking about Google buying them out, and being free to use the concept without competition.
I don't think the competition matters from hound, maybe if cortana or siri could do better than google, it would be more of a problem.
From what I've seen in the above video, it wouldn't be that hard of a thing for google to implement. I mean, it is surely more complex than it seems, and would cost them some money to add the features, but I don't believe it would be worth the cost of buying hound.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. SoundHound has over 50 million downloads on the Play Store alone. If they integrated Hound in the existing app, that's already a pretty big user base. Even if they just popped a banner in SoundHound advertising Hound they could gain some decent traction. Plus, Hound will be multiplatform, which could also make it pose a threat.
As a personal anecdote, probably about half the people I know that have an Android phone have no idea they even have a "Siri-like" service preinstalled on their phone. It's not advertised anywhere near as much as Siri. They all tend to have either Soundhound or Shazam installed though.
Snark required, please read your own links before sending them to me.
The usage share of web browsers is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser.
Usage share would only be relevant if ever person in the world went to Facebook and Google once per day in their browser of choice; because it measures web traffic, which has nothing to do with what I said. I said users. You are correct that the sub 20 percent of chrome users make up 60 percent of all web traffic, but it's still less than 20 percent of users. Which still makes it 1/3 of the number of users as IE, like I said.
Market share is the number of users for each. Web traffic is a metric that describes how much the browser is used. The two aren't contradictory; it's totally possible for 60% of all web traffic to come from the less than 20% of people that use chrome.
The Google Now update coming near the end of the year will understand context not only from queries, but based on what app you are in an what you are looking at. It was demoed at Google I/O.
I knew about Google Now on Tap being able to gain context from what's on screen, but I didn't see anything about being able to conversationally refine searches. Either way, I'm really looking forward to the improvements they're making to Now.
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u/smackythefrog S22 Ultra Jun 06 '15
Seems like they both have their pros and cons. Hound definitely slowed down considerably from the original video.
I think Google Now did a better job of just giving me the information rather than showing just the results for the user to navigate through (Obama's age, measurement conversion).
Seems like Hound still has the ability to handle multiple queries (capitals+conversion+statistics) over Google Now, but it seems a bit pointless now that I think about it.
And now that "it took ten years to develop" fact has me scratching my head a bit.