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SoundHound CEO wants SOUN to be in ‘all the enterprise brands’

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SoundHound AI Inc (NASDAQ: SOUN) chief executive Keyvan Mohajer wants his company to be in “all the enterprise brands”.

The artificial intelligence enabled speech recognition company, he’s convinced, is poised to grow at a fast clip as it continues to diversify out of automotive and into retail, healthcare, finance, insurance, and even governments.

In fact, SOUN has already become the “AI leader in restaurants”, as per the CEO.

SoundHound stock is up another 18% today as investors continue to cheer its Amela AI Agents that have handled more than 100,000 customer calls for Apivia Courtage in 2024.  

The French wholesale broker has been able to improve productivity by a whopping 20% with the use of SOUN’s conversational AI agents this year.

SoundHound beats big-tech APIs

CEO Keyvan Mohajer sees AI gents for customer service as the “biggest near-term opportunity for generative artificial intelligence.”

He’s bullish on what the future holds for his company as it’s among the handful of names that have in-house speech recognition technology.

SOUN’s tech even beats big-tech APIs in terms of accuracy and speed, the chief executive revealed in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance.

Wall Street analysts share his optimism as evidenced in their consensus “overweight” rating on SoundHound stock.

Mohajer expects artificial intelligence to be a net positive – it will create more jobs as humans will remain in the driving seat, he argued.

“We used to work in farms and then the machines came and now we drive those machines. AI is the machine now. So, people are going to pilot the AI to do good things.”

SOUN to improve margins moving forward

SoundHound topped Street estimates in its latest reported quarter despite slight deterioration on the margin front.

Speaking with Yahoo Finance, the company’s chief executive attributed margin weakness to recent acquisitions, saying “they have their own clouds, we have our own. They use third-party APIs for AI models, we have our own AI model. So, there’s some duplicate costs.”

Such costs, he’s convinced, will eliminate and margins will improve over time.

SOUN narrowed its per-share loss to 4 cents as revenue soared 89% on a year-over-year basis to $25.1 million in Q3.

The AI enabled voice recognition company expects to achieve profitability in 2025.

SoundHound trimmed its reliance on a single segment and a single customer in the recently concluded quarter as well.

It drove only 25% of its business from automotive versus 90% last year.

The company’s largest customer contributed only 12% in Q3 versus 72% in the same quarter of 2023.

Wedbush Securities analysts currently see upside in SoundHound stock to $10 that translates to about a 10% upside on top of a 100% rally over the past two months.

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