Hound styles itself as Siri or Cortana with a PhD

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Tired of talking to your smartphone's personal assistant like Tarzan? You know the drill: "Find coffee."

Soon you won't have to.

SoundHound, the free app with 260 million downloads that listens to music or humming and tells you what's playing, debuts a new app Tuesday in private Android-only beta called Hound. A full consumer launch comes this summer, and an iOS version will follow as well.

Think of Hound as a Siri or Cortana with a PhD, a virtual assistant that welcomes complex and even convoluted questions. How convoluted?

"What is the population and sizes of India and China and what are the capitals and what are the country codes for Italy and France?" SoundHound founder and CEO Keyvan Mohajer asks his phone, which a split-second later reels off every answer correctly. He smiles. "We have been working on this for nine years."

Hound combines voice recognition with natural language understanding in a way that allows users to not only ask questions more naturally, but also ask follow-up queries without repeating the original question. As in, "What's the weather out?" followed by "How about tomorrow?"

Improving human-smartphone voice interaction is on the front burner these days. At Google's recent developers conference, I/O, the search company previewed its forthcoming Now on Tap feature. The machine-learning enhanced version of Google Now offers new levels of contextual understanding similar to Hound.

Mohajer and company vice president Katie McMahon recently previewed Hound for USA TODAY (to hear Mohajer talk about Hound see below), highlighting a partnership they engineered with travel site Expedia, whose mission is to turn your smartphone into a travel agent.

When Mohajer asks Hound for "pet-friendly hotels near the Golden Gate Bridge with three stars or more stars under $200 excluding bed and breakfasts," within seconds the screen reveals a breakdown of hotels meeting those specific criteria.

Other examples of Hound's ability to decipher context include being able to answer multi-layered questions such as "What is the capital of the country with the Space Needle?" and "What time is sunrise two days before Christmas 2021 in Moscow."

The service is free because "we want the broadest adoption possible," says Mohajer, whose Santa Clara-based company has raised $40 million in venture funding over the past decade and generates revenue from licensing and ads.

SoundHound exes have high hopes for the app. "When Apple launched the iPhone, it changed that company forever. We hope the same will be true with us and Hound," says McMahon, rattling off a list of Internet of Things devices - from robotic vacuum cleaners to cars - that can benefit from natural language understanding. "Our mission statement is two words. Houndify everything."

Hound's accompanying developer platform, Houndify, is aimed at getting the mushrooming number of connected devices – 25 billion by 2020, according to Gartner – to speak Hound.

"Voice will never replace touch, but it will be coming to almost every product we own," says Mohajer. "Imagine telling your coffee maker, 'Make me a double latte with light foam,' just like you would a real barista?"

Hound features dozens of category domains, including navigation, weather, stocks and geography. It can also handle questions on more esoteric topics, including mortgage calculation and flight status.

Mohajer, who has a PhD in electrical engineering and speech recognition from Stanford University, says he wanted to work on human-machine communication after grad school, but the notion was a sci-fi no-go for VCs.

"I told them, look in ten years we'll all be talking to computers, but that was too far out for them so they funded my idea for an app that could decipher a song from a hum," he says with a laugh.

Now that Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are deep into the search for speech recognition that borders on artificial intelligence – not to mention the fact that Hollywood has even taken the topic for a spin in the futuristic movie Her – Mohajer feels more than vindicated.

"It's here, and it's only going to get better. Now, my other prediction is that we'll see a hotel on the moon." He smiles. "Who knows, thanks to (SpaceX and Tesla founder) Elon Musk, maybe I'll be right about that, too."

Follow me on Twitter: @marcodellacava