SoundHound Inc.®, a provider of voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies, announced a partnership with Kia Motors India to bring a powerful, custom voice interface to Kia’s latest SUV in the Indian market, the Seltos. Powered by SoundHound Inc.’s Houndify™ voice AI platform, Kia Seltos drivers can speak queries and control various aspects of the car simply by using their natural voices. The Kia Seltos SUV launches with support for understanding English, specifically Indian-English accents, with support for additional languages across the Indian region coming later. The Houndify-powered Kia Seltos began shipping in India earlier this month.
With Houndify, Kia Seltos drivers are able to use their natural voices to:
- Search in real-time for locations of interest
- Ask about the weather, date, and time
- Make a phone call
- Control the car’s media and navigation
- Use in-car climate controls to adjust the temperature and fan speeds.
- And more…
Thanks to Houndify’s conversational voice interface, Kia Seltos drivers will not need to remember specific voice commands or phrases to control the various aspects of their car. Example queries include: “Please tell me today’s weather,” “I feel hot,” “Change the temperature to 22 degrees celsius,” “Would you please turn on the AC?” and “Turn the fan speed to Max.”
Houndify technologies represent more than a decade of R&D and innovation by SoundHound Inc., resulting in unique advantages, making it the smartest and most accurate voice AI platform in the market. SoundHound Inc.’s patented Speech-to-Meaning™ and Deep Meaning Understanding™ technologies deliver unprecedented speed and accuracy in voice recognition and responses, and an ability to understand context, such as the user’s location or previous queries, to support natural interactions. Another key advantage of Houndify is its architecture for collaborative intelligence called “Collective AI,” a powerful mechanism that facilitates collaboration among developers by enabling them to extend the functionality of existing knowledge domains. This results in a global AI with comprehensive knowledge that is always learning, is crowdsourced to domain experts, and is larger than the sum of its parts.
