Over a long weekend in February, eight hundred hackers from twenty elite universities spanning eight countries descended on Stanford’s campus to participate in the annual TreeHacks hackathon. In less than thirty-six hours, teams of students enthusiastically turned ideas into working products spanning real-world security, health, and energy issues.

SoundHound Inc. sponsored the event by providing participants face time with a dozen of our voice and mobile engineers and enterprise-level access to Houndify, our Voice AI developer platform. At the end of a sleepless weekend, fifteen new products powered by Houndify were introduced. After careful consideration, our engineers chose the top three products that best utilized Houndify. Each winner received a Houndify subscription and a cash prize to further development of their product.

1st place: Hero Alert

Imagine seeing someone you love experience a health issue. Our first instinct is to phone emergency services and report the incident. To save a life, information must be conveyed quickly and accurately in a stressful environment. Children without proper education struggle to communicate details of these events with authorities.

Enter: Hero Alert, a unique application built with Houndify to help educate children on the proper ways to interact with medics, police, and firefighters. The team built a conversational AI bot with natural language processing that listened to a child’s response and tailored the conversation accordingly to simulate interactions with emergency operators.

Learn more about Hero Alert

2nd place: Social Engineer Firewall

After years of hard work, your enterprise IT project is complete. The security team cleared the project of vulnerabilities and has greenlit deployment. Every technical safeguard possible has been implemented to protect sensitive employee and customer data. But while being focused on the technical requirements, social vulnerabilities are often overlooked.

The Social-Engineer Firewall (SEF) was developed to shield companies from threats by continually listening for audible fishing attempts and promptly alerting administrators. By actively monitoring for known attack signatures with Houndify’s voice-to-speech transcription engine, SEF is on track to become the world’s first solution to protect the OSI Level 8 (end-user/human) from social engineer attacks.

Protect your enterprise with SEF

3rd Place: Oyes

Our lives are evolving at a breakneck pace. From AI advancement to political sagas, staying abreast of current events is a daunting and time-consuming task.

Oyes was developed to help educate users on current events quickly and accurately. The voice-first iOS app, built with Houndify, aids user in discovering news on a given topic by allowing them to simply ask. Oyes will return a list of credible articles on a requested topic and reads aloud the selected piece.

Powered By Houndify

One out of every four hackathon teams used the Houndify platform to bring their ideas to life. Our attending engineers were overjoyed with the enthusiasm, excitement, and support shown for our Voice AI platform, Houndify.

SoundHound Inc. was honored to sponsor TreeHacks and support the enterprising students who are hacking to make a difference.