For SoundHound Inc., developing a wildly popular app with hundreds of millions of downloads was just the first step toward success.

The Santa Clara-based startup, which has carved out a niche by helping mobile users identify unfamiliar songs, Tuesday said it has raised $75 million to launch the next stage of its plan. SoundHound is looking to establish the sophisticated artificial intelligence at the core of its app as the industry’s leading speech recognition platform.

The firm is targeting not only music and other forms of entertainment but also the growing number of voice-controlled technologies that are entering the market. That’s likely to put it in some serious competition, since big tech companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and others are targeting voice interfaces as well.

This trend is driven in large part by the rapid adoption of virtual assistants that are automating menial administrative tasks previously carried out by humans. Some banks, for instance, rely on the technology to handle customer support, while other companies employ chatbots to streamline their cybersecurity operations. More and more of these bots are being equipped with speech recognition algorithms that enable them to take voice commands.

Houndify, as SoundHound’s platform is called, sets itself apart in a couple of ways. First, the engine allows users to make elaborate commands (such as “find plane tickets to San Francisco for next month that cost between $300 and $600″) without having to break them up into multiple parts. Its algorithms then quickly decipher the meaning of each request in a way that SoundHound says is considerably more efficient than traditional approaches.

As a result, the startup says that Houndify enables chatbots to work faster while streamlining the experience for users. SoundHound will use its new funding to improve the engine even further. The effort is set to place a particular emphasis on expanding the firm’s Collective AI, a knowledge repository that its platform uses to understand the context of requests.

Houndify already handles speech recognition tasks for more than 500 services and devices. One of the companies that have adopted the platform is Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which was one of the flagship investors in this week’s round. It was joined by about a dozen other backers including Nvidia Corp.’s GPU Ventures. The latter firm is supporting SoundHound because artificial intelligence workloads are typically run on graphic processing units, meaning that the more companies adopt the technology, the bigger the demand for its chips will become.

The investment reportedly values SoundHound at around $800 million.

Image courtesy of SoundHound