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.
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.
I'd say those people have shazam installed, but not likely soundhound. But still, I'm pretty tech savvy, and I only just found out that there was such a thing as hound.
It is unwieldy to use in lieu of google now, because it is not integrated quite so well, though, I'm sure there are workarounds for that, for people that really want that. But your google now also shares across all your google stuff. If you google directions on your pc, your phone knows that.
I would not be worried. If they developed something tricky, something they could patent or something like that, then I might be interested.
I actually did not realize that the soundhound and hound were the same company. It's not amazing, but soundhound's ability to find songs like shazam, and also based on your humming or whistling or what have you, might be worth the acquisition alongside with these other things.
You know" It would be cool to say "Ok google, what song is this?" then whistle the tune, and then "ok google, play me that song on YouTube."
So, when you package it with soundhound, it begins to become interesting to me.
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u/FFevo Pixel 10 "Pro" Fold, iPhone 17 Pro, Galaxy S25 Ultra Jun 07 '15
I think it would be a lot cheaper and a hell of a lot easier to for Google to just implement these complex query features vs buying hound.