Dan Ives, the popular tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, is quite gung-ho about the AI revolution. Quite often heard saying that “It is still 10 PM in the AI party, and the party goes on till 4 AM,” Ives certainly has his party favorites, chief among them being chip giant Nvidia (NVDA) and AI-driven data analysis company, Palantir (PLTR).
However, his other bets in the AI race do not garner as much limelight as the aforementioned duo. Thus, its recent note on SoundHound AI (SOUN) is worth, well, listening to.
Founded in 2005, SoundHound builds voice, sound and natural-language AI technologies involving speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition, voice interfaces, and conversational agents. Its applications span multiple verticals, including automotive (voice assistants in cars), smart devices & IoT, enterprise customer service, restaurant/delivery voice ordering, and other conversational-AI use cases.
Valued at a market cap of $5.8 billion, the SOUN stock is down 27% on a year-to-date (YTD) basis. Yet, Ives and his associates remain bullish about the company, stating, “SOUN slightly raised its FY25 guidance to $165.0 million to $180.0 million (prior guidance of $160.0 million to $178.0 million) which we believe is conservative as demand remains strong across all vertical as it continues to see slight improvements in automotive along with strong growth in other verticals.”
So, should investors also tune in to SoundHound? Let’s analyze.
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SoundHound AI’s latest results for Q3 2025 saw the company reporting record revenues. Yet, its losses came in wider than expected when compared to Street estimates, as profitability remains elusive for the company.
In Q3, the company’s revenues came in at $42 million, up 68% from the previous year as the company secured several deals across industries such as automotive, financial services, healthcare, and insurance, among others. Conversely, losses widened significantly to $0.27 per share from $0.06 per share as the company struggles to deal with scale. Estimates were for a loss of $0.09 per share.
Notably, net cash used in operating activities also increased for the nine months ended September 30, 2025, to $76.3 million from $75.8 million in the year-ago period. Despite the widening in the cash outflow from operating activities, SoundHound closed the quarter with a cash balance of $268.9 million, which was much higher than its short-term debt levels of $2.3 million.
So, the financials do not really inspire that much confidence in the SOUN stock as an investment. What does is its growth potential, and there are certainly some solid drivers for it, underpinned by AI.
SoundHound AI’s leadership in the AI-driven conversational tech market is commendable, which acts as a solid base for the company to capture the rapidly growing agentic AI market. Notably, the company’s expansive data repository stands as a pivotal asset in advancing these objectives. The management has previously highlighted that its platforms now handle in excess of 1 billion queries monthly, a metric that underscores robust operational expansion and a pronounced edge in data accumulation. Going forward, as platform usage intensifies, the resultant insights sharpen the efficacy of machine learning and AI-driven enhancements, facilitating accelerated innovation in product development. This dynamic establishes SoundHound’s inaugural point of distinction relative to industry peers.
SoundHound further sets itself apart from established voice assistants, including Amazon’s (AMZN) Alexa and Google’s (GOOG) (GOOG) Home devices, by fusing its proprietary machine learning frameworks, CaiNET and CaiLAN, with generative AI and large language models to yield more fluid and precise conversational interactions. This integration empowers clients to preserve their distinctive branding, retain ownership over their information, and shape the end-user journey on their terms.
Moreover, strategic buyouts, including those of Amelia and SYNQ3, are poised to deliver meaningful accretive value. The Amelia acquisition fortifies SoundHound’s foothold in financial services, insurance, and medical sectors, whereas SYNQ3 brings expertise in voice-enabled solutions tailored for hospitality, backed by a prospective base exceeding 100,000 restaurant sites and commitments from over 10,000 to date.
Lastly, recent alliances have additionally reinforced SoundHound’s stature as a frontrunner in agentic AI applications. One such arrangement involves the casual dining operator Red Lobster, which plans to implement a novel agentic AI solution for managing inbound telephone orders across its network of more than 500 outlets. This deployment aims to refine order processing workflows, thereby elevating service quality. For SoundHound, the initiative offers a compelling showcase of deployment at scale, potentially enticing additional participants within the fast-casual dining segment.
Equally significant is the expanded collaboration with Apivia Courtage, a prominent French intermediary in commercial insurance. The broker intends to integrate SoundHound’s Amelia 7 agentic AI system across its call center infrastructure to address diverse client engagements. This builds upon an established relationship dating to 2023, during which prior SoundHound implementations yielded a 20% improvement in contact center performance. The current phase advances those foundations by incorporating autonomous agents adept at deliberation, strategy formulation, and fulfillment of intricate, multifaceted requests, eliminating the need for human intervention. At the same time, the partnership extends SoundHound’s international profile well beyond its primary domestic stronghold of the United States.
SoundHound is a pure play on voice-enabled by AI, which separates it from other larger players, for whom it is just one of their products. Although this differentiates it from them, the company does not have the deep pockets that they possess. Yet, the company is not ceding ground and remains a credible choice for enterprises, as evidenced by the recent partnerships. Now, the primary goal of the company should be to do this profitably.
Overall, analysts have rated SOUN stock a “Moderate Buy”, with a mean target price of $16.50. This implies an upside potential of about 17% from current levels. Out of nine analysts covering the stock, five have a “Strong Buy” rating, and four have a “Hold” rating.
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On the date of publication, Pathikrit Bose did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com
A pleasant female voice greets me over the phone. “Hi, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I help?”
“Do you have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad as she tells me that unfortunately, the San Francisco–based Vietnamese restaurant doesn’t have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn’t the result of her having a bad day. Rather, her tone is a feature, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a new, growing clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you recently called up a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are you have spoken to one of Jasmine’s polite, calculated competitors.
In the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality phone agents haven’t been getting as much attention as consumer-based generative AI tools like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. And yet, the niche is heating up, with multiple emerging startups vying for restaurant accounts across the US. Last May, voice ordering AI garnered much attention at the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show. Bodega, the high-end Vietnamese restaurant I called, used Maitre-D AI, which launched primarily in the Bay Area in 2024. Newo, another new startup, is currently rolling its software out at numerous Silicon Valley restaurants. One-year-old RestoHost is now answering calls at 150 restaurants in the Atlanta metro area, and Slang, a voice AI company that started focusing on restaurants exclusively during the Covid-19 pandemic and announced a $20 million funding round in 2023, is gaining ground in the New York and Las Vegas markets.
All of them offer a similar service: an around-the-clock AI phone host that can answer generic questions about the restaurant’s dress code, cuisine, seating arrangements, and food allergy policies. They can also assist with making, altering, or canceling a reservation. In some cases, the agent can direct the caller to an actual human, but according to RestoHost cofounder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra, only 10 percent of the calls result in that. Each platform offers the restaurant subscription tiers that unlock additional features, and some of the systems can speak multiple languages.
But who even calls a restaurant in the era of Google and Resy? According to some of the founders of AI voice host startups, many customers do, and for various reasons. “Restaurants get a high volume of phone calls compared to other businesses, especially if they’re popular and take reservations,” says Alex Sambvani, CEO and cofounder of Slang, which currently works with everyone from the Wolfgang Puck restaurant group to Chick-fil-A to the fast-casual chain Slutty Vegan. Sambvani estimates that in-demand establishments receive between 800 and 1,000 calls per month. Typical callers tend to be last-minute bookers, tourists and visitors, older people, and those who do their errands while driving.
Matt Ho, the owner of Bodega SF, confirms this scenario. “The phones would ring constantly throughout service,” he says. “We would receive calls for basic questions that can be found on our website.” To solve this issue, after shopping around, Ho found that Maitre-D was the best fit. Bodega SF became one of the startup’s earliest clients in May, and Ho even helped the founders with trial and error testing prior to launch. “This platform makes the job easier for the host and does not disturb guests while they’re enjoying their meal,” he says.
Later in the year, Google will imbue Gemini Live with Project Astra, the computer vision tech it teased at its developer conference in May. This will allow you to use your phone’s camera app and, in real time, ask Gemini about the objects you are looking at in the real world. Imagine walking past a concert poster and asking it to store the dates in your calendar and to set up a reminder to buy tickets.
Talk to Me
Our experiences using voice assistants until this point have largely been transactional, so when I chatted with Gemini Live, I found initiating a conversation with the bot to be a little awkward. It’s a big step beyond asking Google Assistant or Alexa for the weather report, to open your blinds, or whether your dog can eat celery. You might have a follow-up here and there, but it was not built around the flow of a conversation the way Gemini Live was.
Hsiao tells me she enjoys using Gemini Live in the car on her drive home from work. She started a conversation about the Paris Olympics and about Celine Dion singing at the opening ceremony. “Can you tell me a little bit about the song she sang?” Hsiao asked. The AI responded with the song’s origin, writer, and what it meant, and after some back and forth, Hsiao discovered Celine Dion could sing in Chinese.
“I was so surprised,” she says. “But that just gives you an example of how you can find out stuff; it’s an interaction with technology that people couldn’t have before this kind of curiosity and exploration through conversation. This is just the beginning of where we’re headed with the Gemini assistant.”
In my demo, I asked Gemini what I should eat for dinner. It asked if I wanted something light and refreshing or a hearty meal. We went on, back and forth, and when Gemini suggested a shrimp dish I lied and said I was allergic to shrimp, to which it then recommended salmon. I said I didn’t have salmon. “You could always grill up some chicken breasts and toss them in a salad with grilled salad and a light vinaigrette dressing.” I asked for a recipe, and it started going through the instructions step by step. I interrupted it, but I can go back into the Gemini app to find the recipe later.
I leave ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode on while writing this article as an ambient AI companion. Occasionally, I’ll ask it to provide a synonym for an overused word, or some encouragement. Around half an hour in, the chatbot interrupts our silence and starts speaking to me in Spanish, unprompted. I giggle a bit and ask what’s going on. “Just a little switch up? Gotta keep things interesting,” says ChatGPT, now back in English.
While testing Advanced Voice Mode as part of the early alpha, my interactions with ChatGPT’s new audio feature were entertaining, messy, and surprisingly varied, though it’s worth noting that the features I had access to were only half of what OpenAI demonstrated when it launched the GPT-4o model in May. The vision aspect we saw in the livestreamed demo is now scheduled for a later release, and the enhanced Sky voice, which Her actor Scarlett Johanssen pushed back on, has been removed from Advanced Voice Mode and is no longer an option for users.
So, what’s the current vibe? Right now, Advanced Voice Mode feels reminiscent of when the original text-based ChatGPT dropped, late in 2022. Sometimes it leads to unimpressive dead ends or devolves into empty AI platitudes. But other times the low-latency conversations click in a way that Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa never have for me, and I feel compelled to keep chatting out of enjoyment. It’s the kind of AI tool you’ll show your relatives during the holidays for a laugh.
OpenAI gave a few WIRED reporters access to the feature a week after the initial announcement but pulled it the next morning, citing safety concerns. Two months later, OpenAI soft-launched Advanced Voice Mode to a small group of users and released GPT-4o’s system card, a technical document that outlines red-teaming efforts, what the company considers to be safety risks, and mitigation steps the company has taken to reduce harm.
Curious to give it a go yourself? Here’s what you need to know about the larger rollout of Advanced Voice Mode, and my first impressions of ChatGPT’s new voice feature, to help you get started.
So, When’s the Full Rollout?
OpenAI released an audio-only Advanced Voice Mode to some ChatGPT Plus users at the end of July, and the alpha group still seems relatively small. The company plans to enable it for all subscribers sometime this fall. Niko Felix, a spokesperson for OpenAI, shared no additional details when asked about the release timeline.
Screen and video sharing were a core part of the original demo, but they are not available in this alpha test. OpenAI plans to add those aspects eventually, but it’s also not clear when that will happen.
If you’re a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you’ll receive an email from OpenAI when the Advanced Voice Mode is available to you. After it’s on your account, you can switch between Standard and Advanced at the top of the app’s screen when ChatGPT’s voice mode is open. I was able to test the alpha version on an iPhone as well as a Galaxy Fold.
My First Impressions of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode
Within the very first hour of speaking with it, I learned that I love interrupting ChatGPT. It’s not how you would talk with a human, but having the new ability to cut off ChatGPT mid-sentence and request a different version of the output feels like a dynamic improvement and a standout feature.
Early adopters who were excited by the original demos may be frustrated to get access to a version of Advanced Voice Mode that’s restricted with more guardrails than anticipated. For example, although generative AI singing was a key component of the launch demos, with whispered lullabies and multiple voices attempting to harmonize, AI serenades are absent from the alpha version.
A pretty major part of staying safe while driving is keeping your eyes on the road. When you need to take a call, switch playlists, or change the destination you’re navigating to, that’s not always easy. We should all pull over when these jobs need doing (or get a passenger to do them), but that doesn’t always happen.
By using your voice to interact with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, you can get directions, look up information, and control media playback without moving your hands from the wheel or your eyes away from what’s ahead of you. Here’s how it’s done when you’re connected to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay in your vehicle.
Speaking to Android Auto
Enabling hands-free activation on Android Auto via a Pixel phone. (David Nield)
There are a few ways to get Android Auto to listen to you. One is to tap the microphone icon that appears at the side of the interface, alongside the list of recently used apps. Another is to press the voice command button on your car’s steering wheel, if there is one. It looks different in some cars, but it typically shows an illustration of a person’s face in profile, mouth open, with sound waves coming out of their mouth. (Check your vehicle’s documentation if you’re not sure.)
If you want to go completely hands-free and use a “Hey Google” prompt to get Android Auto to listen, you need to make sure voice prompts are enabled on your phone. From Settings, pick Connected devices > Connection preferences (Google Pixel phones) or just Connected devices (Samsung Galaxy phones), then Android Auto.
Choose ‘Hey Google’ detection and you’ll see two toggle switches—so you can either enable hands-free voice activation on your phone all of the time, or only when you’re driving. Note that if you haven’t already done so, enabling this feature will require you to record a few audio speech samples so your phone knows how to recognize you when you’re talking and making requests.
Speaking to Apple CarPlay
Enabling hands-free activation on Apple CarPlay via an iPhone. (David Nield)
As with Android Auto, there may be a voice command button on your car’s steering wheel that you can press before talking to Siri on Apple CarPlay. It depends on the make, model, and age of your vehicle, so if the voice control button doesn’t appear obvious, you may have to check in the manual to find it. (Look for the button with a picture of a person speaking.)
There are several voice assistants locked in a tug-of-war over who controls the smart speakers in your home: Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. We prefer Google. Its Assistant answers questions more accurately, has a simpler setup process, and connects to a growing number of smart home devices. All the devices below have built-in Google Assistant, so you can ask it anything you’d search for on Google, or ask it to control smart home products like robot vacuums, smart plugs, lights, and TVs.
Updated May 2024: We’ve updated this guide with details about Google’s AI script editor for Google Home, and we’ve added notes about using Google with Sonos.
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Barret Zoph, a research lead at OpenAI, was recently demonstrating the new GPT-4o model and its ability to detect human emotions though a smartphone camera when ChatGPT misidentified his face as a wooden table. After a quick laugh, Zoph assured GPT-4o that he’s not a table and asked the AI tool to take a fresh look at the app’s live video rather than a photo he shared earlier. “Ah, that makes more sense,” said ChatGPT’s AI voice, before describing his facial expression and potential emotions.
On Monday, OpenAI launched a new model for ChatGPT that can process text, audio, and images. In a surprising turn, the company announced that this model, GPT-4o, would be available for free, no subscription required. It’s a departure from the company’s previous rollout of GPT-4, which was released in March 2023 for those who pay OpenAI’s $20-per-month subscription to ChatGPT Plus. In this current release, many of the features that were previously gated off to paying subscribers, like memory and web browsing, are now rolling out to free users as well.
Last year, when I tested a nascent version of ChatGPT’s web browsing capability, it had flaws but was powerful enough to make the subscription seem worthwhile for early adopters looking to experiment with the latest technology. Because the freshest AI model from OpenAI, as well as previously gated features, are available without a subscription, you may be wondering if that $20 a month is still worthwhile. Here’s a quick breakdown to help you understand what’s available with OpenAI’s free version versus what you get with ChatGPT Plus.
What’s Available With Free ChatGPT?
To reiterate, you don’t need any kind of special subscription to start using the OpenAI GPT-4o model today. Just know that you’re rate-limited to fewer prompts per hour than paid users, so be thoughtful about the questions you pose to the chatbot or you’ll quickly burn through your allotment of prompts.
In addition to limited GPT-4o access, nonpaying users received a major upgrade to their overall user experience, with multiple features that were previously just for paying customers. The GPT Store, where anyone can release a version of ChatGPT with custom instructions, is now widely available. Free users can also use ChatGPT’s web-browsing tool and memory features and can upload photos and files for the chatbot to analyze.
What’s Still Gated to ChatGPT Plus?
While GPT-4o is available without a subscription, you may want to keep ChatGPT Plus for two reasons: access to more prompts and newer features. “You can use the model significantly more on Plus,” Zoph tells WIRED. “There’s a lot of other exciting, future things to come as well.” Compared to nonsubscribers, ChatGPT Plus subscribers are allowed to send GPT-4o five times as many prompts before having to wait or switch to a less powerful model. So, if you want to spend a decent amount of time messaging back and forth with OpenAI’s most powerful option, a subscription is necessary.
Although some of the previously exclusive features for ChatGPT Plus are rolling out to nonpaying users, the splashiest of updates are still offered first behind OpenAI’s paywall. The impressive voice mode that Zoph demonstrated on stage is arriving sometime over the next couple of weeks for ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
In OpenAI’s demo videos, the bubbly AI voice sounds more playful than previous iterations and is able to answer questions in response to a live video feed. “I honestly think the ways people are going to discover use cases around this is gonna be incredibly creative,” says Zoph. During the presentation, he also showed how the voice mode could be used to translate between English and Italian. After the presentation, the company released another video showing speech translation working in real time.
