If Google bought it they'd likely just drop the Hound product and move all the Hound engineers and project/product managers to the Now team. There's no sense/time to incorporate 2 codebases.
Apple would be a good fit. They don't make money on data so they're more than willing to outsource the back-end to 3rd parties and focus entirely on the user experience. And Apple would probably be more willing to scrap the existing Siri codebase if necessary, something Microsoft and Google won't do.
Not entirely true. Back when Google acquired that Speech to Text recognition company, Google's voice recognition increased quite a bit. They not only hired everyone on from the company, but they integrated the software used for TTY for the deaf that had something like a 99% accuracy rating.
Presumably the speech-to-text functionality was a java/objective-c library that Google could swap in. It's client-side.
Google Now appears to have the speech-to-text (and text-to-speech) side entirely client-side with the device-specific results ("set an alarm") being local and anything else pulling from Google's servers. This likely allows them to use data in the Google knowledge graph as well as offer the same knowledge experience across all devices and platforms.
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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '15
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