SoundHound’s Houndify to power connected features of Kia’s SUV in India

SoundHound Inc., the leading innovator in 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 as also use in-car climate controls to adjust the temperature and fan speeds.

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.”

“The Houndify platform is the perfect fit for automotive brands wanting to deliver an innovative, conversational, and personalised voice experience to their drivers,” said Keyvan Mohajer, Co-Founder & CEO of SoundHound Inc. “We’re thrilled to continue expanding Houndify’s global presence by partnering with Kia and enhancing the in-car driving experience for their Indian customers.”

“Kia Motors’ association with SoundHound Inc. is a fine example of our efforts to deliver the best of technology that adds comfort and elevates the driving experience,” said Manohar Bhat, Vice President and Head of Sales and Market at Kia Motors. “Since the inception of the Kia brand in India, we are committed to offering a product that is tailored according to our Indian customer needs and with Houndify technology in Seltos, our customers will have the convenience of giving voice commands to their cars without any tone modulation. We are also exploring the possibility of providing regional language support to offer additional convenience and a true Indian experience to our customers.”

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 g