2024 Speech Industry Award Winner: SoundHound Drives Voice AI’s Expansion

Since its founding in 2005, SoundHound has largely been viewed as a speech recognition company. Over the past 20 years, though, the Santa Clara, Calif., company has expanded into natural language understanding, sound and music recognition, search, virtual assistant, and voice artificial intelligence technologies, among others.

Now, the company is building toward a vision of a voice commerce ecosystem that enables consumers to access goods and services through natural conversation. This includes plans to voice-enable food and drink ordering.

To that end, SoundHound has aggressively invested in its SoundHound for Restaurants voice ordering solution. In June it acquired key assets from Allset, an online restaurant ordering platform provider, and in December it acquired SYNQ3 Restaurant Solutions, a provider of voice artificial intelligence and other technology for restaurants.

“Restaurant operators are turning to technology en masse, and voice AI is now playing a key role in helping them drive sales, reduce costs, and alleviate the burden of increasing demand on their employees,” said Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and cofounder of SoundHound, in a statement.

Intertwined with this industry push, SoundHound in the past few months also introduced Employee Assist, a conversational AI product that allows restaurant employees to learn about food, tasks, and other operations without having to consult a manual or other employees. Employee Assist uses SoundHound’s AI to learn and understand instruction manuals, ingredient and allergen information, and more. It then relays this knowledge directly to employees as part of a fluid two-way conversation, with the system able to answer questions and follow-up questions.

Also new from the company this year is Chat AI, which enables consumers and businesses to submit queries by speaking while text and/or audio output relays the response. Users can also ask follow-up questions and commands as needed.

SoundHound also launched the fully automated Smart Answering service, which accepts inbound customer calls and then, using speech recognition, natural language understanding, and generative AI, reads and integrates company website information to give tailored, conversational responses to queries.

ChowNow, an online ordering and marketing platform for independent restaurants, this year agreed to make Smart Answering available to all restaurants on its systems.

And then there is Intelligent Transcription, fueled by SoundHound’s Speech-to-Meaning system to generate the text of a conversation in real time and simultaneously structure it and tag key topics and entities from which it infers speaker meaning and intent. Intelligent Transcription can also be combined with predictive analytics to suggest responses and next best actions across a broad range of topics.

SoundHound also launched Chat AI for Automotive, an in-vehicle voice assistant to give drivers and their passengers access to information and businesses enabled by complex conversational capabilities.

Also on the automotive front, SoundHound launched a Vehicle Intelligence domain that lets users of its car voice AI platform access the car manual using natural speech. Drivers can ask questions, and SoundHound’s voice AI provides the answer.

SoundHound was already working with 20 vehicle manufacturers to provide in-vehicle voice AI. In February it announced that its AI Voice Assistant with integrated ChatGPT capabilities would go into full production with European automaker Stellantis and in July rolled it out in Stellantis’ Vauxhaul, Opel, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo, and Citroen brands in Europe.

But perhaps its most transformative action came just a few weeks ago when the company acquired Amelia, an artificial intelligence software company for $80 million. The deal significantly expands SoundHound’s voice and conversational generative AI and customer service portfolio. The move also brings expansive voice commerce opportunities, from ordering food to buying tickets and making appointments from millions of devices.

Lanham Napier, president of Amelia, says the deal bolsters SoundHound’s “growing AI customer service business to form a new category leader in the space.

“With impressive penetration into a range of vertical industries, proprietary technology, and decades of combined AI experience, SoundHound is well-positioned to take advantage of burgeoning interest in conversational AI customer support,” he adds.