Hound is an app that’s like a reverse Shazam. Made by SoundHound (a Shazam-like app), it’s a voice recognition app where you say a song title or artist and Hound will gather all the relevant details in one tidy page.
What is it?
Hound, Free, iPhone, Android, iPad. Say you already know a song or artist but you want to find the lyrics or just get more info, all you do is fire up Hound and speak into the app and it’ll pop out all the stuff you want to know. The voice recognition part of Hound is great – it’s the future! – but the results page of Hound is what will keep it on your phone.
Like SoundHound, Hound will spit out a ton of information for you. If you’re searching for a song you’ll get lyrics, YouTube clips, an iTunes link, ringtones, similar artists and sharing options. If you’re looking for an artist you’ll be loaded with their bio, concert dates, a full discography and more.
Essentially, Hound is like a really, really good music-specific search engine.
Who’s it good for?
People who like music. People who want to know more about music. People who are good at remembering song names and artist titles. People who think voice recognition is fun as hell.
Why’s it better than alternatives?
When you type a song name or artist into the Google, you never really know what you’re going to get. With Hound, it’s all about getting the relevant music info. It’s nice to have a place to search where you won’t run into a lot of crap. I’m going to use Hound as my sole lyrics search engine from now on. Oh, and using your voice to search is fun too.
How could it be even better?
The home screen lacks a search option – search is there, if Hound can’t find your result, it’ll give you a list with search – which is weird because when you already know the song, typing it out can be easier than saying it. Some kind of search history would be fun. It’s weird that this is a standalone app, I think it works better as a feature within SoundHound. And lastly, the voice search can be good but it misidentifies songs more often than you’d like.
Hound for iPhone [iTunes]
Hound for Android [Android]