The big upgrade to Hound over voice assistants such as Siri is the ability to speak naturally. Overall, Hound was successful on that front. And it is pretty good at contextualizing based on recent searches. For instance, with an upcoming trip to Pittsburgh, I was able to search first for coffee near Carnegie Mellon, then narrow it down by wifi access and hours. My statements centered on local businesses and pop cultural figures did turn out consistently correct.
However, I did have issues getting some queries to work quite as expected. Most of the errors centered on time. I couldn’t get it to give me the most recent Bruce Springsteen album (just the most popular ones), and an effort to find Chris Rock performances went directly to a google search (although it did register exactly what I said). It also stumbled on getting some of my friends’ names correct. Using it as a hub for texting and calling may not be the best interpretation of Hound’s skills, but its ability to generally sort and find information from the web (without actually resorting to displaying search results) was much better than other programs of this nature that I’ve tried.
In terms of providing a step up from the current crop of personal assistants, Hound has succeeded. But we’ll probably need a few more iterations before the technology has reached its full potential.