When you have giants like Apple Siri, Google Now and Microsoft Cortana to your competition things can be very hard to get going. SoundHound, a new app for Google Android and Apple iOS is aiming to do exactly that, challenging them at being a better "Speech-to-Meaning" engine with better performance and competence.

Hound takes speed and accuracy to a whole new level by combining Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding to become a "Speech-to-Meaning" engine. Hound understands both context and detail, this Speech-to-Meaning capability makes Hound the new way to search and do things faster without typing. Hound gives user the ability to get fast and deep results like looking up the weather, placing a phone call, sending a text message, finding a hotel matching a detailed criteria, navigating to an address, checking the stock market, searching and playing music, and even playing interactive games.

As per the demonstration video posted ahead, the Hound beats the competition hands-down with it's insanely fast results to very very complex queries.

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"Now that is a smartphone," admits Siri as the comparison ends in the latest Windows Phone 8.1 commercial promoted by Microsoft. Pitting the Apple’s Siri digital assistant against the newly unveiled Cortana in Windows Phone 8.1, the advertisement shows how an iPhone 5S pitted against a low-end Lumia 635 fairs as Cortana handles location-based reminders, along with traffic alerts which Siri is not able to do. Do enjoy the "Siri vs. Cortana - Happy Anniversary" commercial shared below.

Using simple commands and phrases to perform easy tasks is what we get using Apple Siri and Google Voice in there current form, imagine what would be the reaction when you see someone coding in Python without touching the keyboard at all and that too faster than the using one - Just watch the amazing video demonstration below.

While Google is paving it's way to offer a competitive virtual voice assistant to Apple's "Siri", the current Siri Alternative solution's on Android platform are not very exciting. Thankfully, under some new exciting development "Nuance Communications" - the team behind technology powering Siri, have released a similar application for Android.

Dragon Go! features the tested and dependable, Nuance voice-recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology allowing users to get direct access to 200+ of the most recognized destinations on the Mobile Web today spanning mobile entertainment and streaming media, social networking, shopping, and every other online content need imaginable simply by using their voice.

Apple's Siri virtual voice assistant seems to have sparked the demand for virtual butlers, tech giant Google is being reported all set to offer their own alternative to "Siri" as "Majel" named after "Majel Barrett" - the voice of the Federation Computer from Star Trek. While all the previous attempts to mimic "Siri" functionality on Android have not been very promising, codenamed project "Majel" will be an evolution to Google’s Voice Actions adding the ability to process natural language. Rumored to get released/announced publicly by end of this year this would be definitely the way to go for future of computing.

Comments from senior Google executive "Amit Singhal" very much sums what Google wants to achieve with "Majel" and change the way we compute today :

While Apple iPhone 4S featured some clever marketing done for their "virtual assistant" software-bot "Siri" but only time will tell how practical the solution will be for common-users specially when it comes to non-native US-English accents. To counter the iPhone 4S feature (Siri) Google has now released the latest version of "Google Translate For Android App" featuring an intelligent and practical feature of "Speech-to-speech" translation between 14 languages to overcome the language barrier, although not exactly similar to "Siri" the technology can be extended further having advantage of multi-accent Google's Voice Recognition technology.

The new Conversation Mode allows a user to speak into their phone’s microphone in their native language, and the Translate app will translate and readout the translation loud - the person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you. The "Google Translate Android App 2.2" now supports translation between English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish languages - a video demonstration of this new feature is posted below.

Addon's have been a major plus for Firefox web-browser enhancing the overall web-surfing experience, and brand new addon Firesay is going to make it even more interesting. Just imagine surfing the web hands-free without touching your keyboard showing off your geek smartness to your friends just via voice-commands - now possible using uber-cool and geeky Firesay addon.

Currently under beta Firesay allows you to control Firefox using voice-commands and supports navigation features like opening new tabs, launching websites, closing tabs and searching Google for specified terms - checkout the video below to see Firesay in action.