SoundHound Inks Deal With Perplexity to Bolster Voice Assistant With Generative AI Search Engine Model

SoundHound has partnered with conversational generative AI search engine developer Perplexity to augment the SoundHound Chat AI voice assistant with Perplexity’s large language models (LLMs). The goal is to boost SoundHound Chat AI’s ability to answer questions about events almost as they happen and make SoundHound’s voice assistant more useful in vehicles and other devices.

SoundHound Perplexity

Perplexity is known for enhancing its generative AI chatbots with footnotes, links, and information culled from online searches. SoundHound Chat AI already counts what the company claims are hundreds of real-time domains. That includes the Vehicle Intelligence feature, which gives a voice to a vehicle’s user manual to answer driver questions.

To parse which LLM to use in answering queries and to make sure the answer makes geographic sense, SoundHound Chat AI employs the company’s Conversational AI Language (CaiLAN) and Conversational AI Network (CaiNet) systems. CaiLAN creates the knowledge domains of local and changeable information the voice assistant uses, such as nearby businesses, traffic, and weather. Meanwhile, CaiNET judges what databases should be accessed to answer user queries and sets up the pipeline to provide the answer when it’s generated.

“By integrating Perplexity search capabilities into SoundHound Chat AI we’re raising the bar for voice assistants and the kinds of queries they can handle effortlessly,” SoundHound COO Mike Zagorsek said. “Where this technology is already deployed in vehicles, we’re seeing usage habits shift substantially – increasing by multiples. We’re confident that this enhancement will further delight users as more and more people choose to talk rather than type.”

The inclusion of Perplexity reinforces SoundHound’s pitch as a source of accurate, up-to-date responses. Static LLMs like those behind the OpenAI’s API have cut-off dates for updates, making it impossible for them to answer about rapidly changing circumstances like current gas prices. SoundHound boasts that with Perplexity’s models, its voice assistant could combine accurate, current gas price data with the information from a week ago, then explain it all in the conversational language before plotting a route to the nearest fuel pump when directed in a follow-up question.

“Through this integration with SoundHound’s Chat AI assistant, we’re one step closer to our goal of making Perplexity available to everyone across every device they use,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer at Perplexity AI. “With the growing popularity of voice AI, we’re allowing users to more easily access the information they need, when they need it.”

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