An application coming from a company called SoundHound that aims to do better than its counterparts is here: the Hound voice assistant can understand and help you better. SoundHound is a name that tried its luck first in music recognition services (think Shazam) but couldn’t keep up with the already rather monopolized market.

So what better way to use the technology you already own than to put it to work in a market segment that really needs some help? While on paper and in ads, smart voice assistants are simply the best tech buddies you can have, in reality, things are hardly that way. Even as a native English speaker, more than just a few individuals have complained that the likes of Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa misunderstand them or start refusing to cooperate from one point of the query and onwards.

The issue that most voice assistants face is the lack of ability to continue elaborating on the same topic. Asking Siri one question such as the movie times is fine, for example, but if you also want to ask something else about the topic afterwards, you need to watch your phrasing and make sure she knows you’re talking about the same thing.

SoundHound’s Hound app tries to work on these areas where other developers have not and provide the public with an assistant that will find it easier to understand you and provide the type of information you need with the least amount of hassle. With the attention that the developers of the app paid to speech recognition and natural language processing, the assistant has a different algorithm that it uses in order to process the information that you give it.

In that sense, Hound is an assistant that you don’t have to think really hard how to ask questions to before doing so. Instead, its capabilities will allow you to ask questions the way you normally do without problems. Not only that but follow-up questions don’t seem to be as big of an issue as they are in the case of other voice assistants either, this being a feature that will actually allow you to refine your search.

Another nifty addition that the developing company has busied itself with in regards to the assistant is partnering up with Yelp and Uber, and the integration of said services into Hound afterwards. That gives you open access to the two applications, directly from Hound, without having to type a thing.

The app is available on both Android and iOS, but currently limited to the United States.

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