SoundHound Raises $75 Million to Take on Amazon, Google in AI

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) have invested in SoundHound, known for its music recognition app, and who have now raised $75 million to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google to build artificial intelligence that helps machines understand human voices. The 12-year-old startup is betting that as more everyday devices get connected to the internet, using speech to control and direct them will become the main form of interaction and the company aims to encourage device makers to use SoundHound voice AI tools over building their own.
As quoted in the press release:

Santa Clara, California-based SoundHound is one of only a few companies that has built from scratch a core AI technology that can identify and interpret audio. Most of the others that have their own speech-recognition engines are big names, including Apple Inc., Baidu Inc., and Microsoft Corp. And many of them tightly control how the software can be used and the data that’s generated, said SoundHound Chief Executive Officer Keyvan Mohajer.
“We don’t have an agenda to hijack your product,” Mohajer said. “If you use Amazon, you lose your brand, your users. You have to ask your user to log into their Amazon account, they have to call on Alexa, and all the data belongs to them.” Meanwhile, when customers build voice-enabled devices or apps using SoundHound’s technology, the startup doesn’t own the users or the data, he said.

Click here for the full text release.