Hound app: This advanced version of Siri is amazing, faintly dystopian

It can deal with context insanely quickly

Hound is a new intelligent personal assistant offering hitherto unseen speed and accuracy and able to handle context and detailed criteria.

It processes queries and fetches information staggeringly quickly (Siri, watch your back). The whole video of SoundHound's CEO testing it out is worth a watch, but here's a taste of one of the exchanges, which is wrapped up in just seconds:

"What is the population and capital for Japan and China and their areas in square miles and square kilometres and also tell me how many people live in India and what is the area code for Germany, France and Italy?"

"The population is 127288000 for Japan and 1 billion 330 million 44 thousand and the capital is Tokyo for Japan and Beijing for China. The area is 145,882 square miles and 377,834 square kilometres for Japan and 3million705 thousand 386 square miles and 9 million 596 thousand 959 square kilometres for China. The population of India is 1 billion 173 million 108 thousand 18. The area code is 49 for Germany, 33 for France and 39 for Italy."

The assistant can also do things like show you Asian restaurants excluding Chinese and Japanese, and source hotels with free Wi-Fi and gym that aren't bed and breakfasts in a flash.

It offers detailed answers so speedily that you can almost imagine it going rogue if unable to process a query and having to be prevented from taking over the world by Will Smith.

"Hound can’t do everything, of course, but, for users who believe that speaking to connected devices should be like how we speak normally, this shows that it’s now possible," the company said.

Hound has just been launched in Beta on Android and is coming soon on iOS. It follows the company's first app SoundHound, which identifies songs just by you singing or humming them.

One question: With the technology being so advanced, why was this video uploaded in only 240p?

@christophhooton