Voice Commerce: from vision to live operation

SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN) announced that its Voice Commerce strategy is moving from a long-term vision phase into pilot projects and advanced testing with global automakers and major fast-food chains. Company leadership stated that the go-live launch is "imminent" — and the technology is already increasing success rates in both new customer acquisition and contract renewals.

Voice Commerce in practice means that a driver can — using only their voice — order food, pay for parking, reserve a restaurant table, or purchase goods directly from the car's onboard system. The technology connects automakers with merchants and creates a new revenue stream for both sides.

Record numbers: 3 billion queries per quarter

The numbers SoundHound has released suggest this is more than just a marketing promise. In the second quarter of 2025, the company reported record revenue of $42.7 million, representing year-over-year growth of 217%. The growth is driven by broad adoption across segments — enterprise, restaurants, and automotive.

Even more impressive is the volume of processed conversations: the platform handled nearly 3 billion voice queries in a single quarter, more than double compared to the previous year. The restaurant segment surpassed the 14,000-location mark, and in automotive, a major contract was added from a new OEM manufacturer in China.

In the first quarter of 2026, revenue further grew to $44.2 million (up 52% year-over-year), and the company also introduced the OASYS platform.

OASYS: a platform combining voice and agentic AI

SoundHound's key weapon is the new OASYS (Orchestrated Agent System) platform — a voice-native conversational AI system that combines autonomous reasoning with fixed rules and the ability for human intervention in real time. In other words: an AI agent that can complete a transaction even when it encounters an unexpected situation.

What sets OASYS apart from the competition? Above all, it is built on its own speech recognition model — it does not rely on third-party services like most chatbots. It handles noise in the car and in a busy restaurant, interruptions mid-sentence, and even language switching during a single conversation. According to published data, the company has accumulated over 400 patents over 20 years of development, and its technology outperforms the voice assistants of major tech companies in speed and accuracy.

The platform also features an "AI builds AI" mechanism — just give it existing training data, transcripts, or company documentation, and it will automatically generate a configured agent ready for deployment. After launch, the agent improves itself daily based on analysis of all interactions.

In the car and in the restaurant: where Voice Commerce is headed

SoundHound Voice Commerce is not targeting automakers alone. The technology connects three parties: drivers, car manufacturers, and merchants. For automakers, it represents a new revenue stream beyond vehicle sales — every transaction made through the onboard system can generate a commission. For merchants, a new sales channel emerges without the cost of building their own app.

Practical scenarios the company demonstrates include:

• AI-powered drive-thru — a voice agent takes orders in noisy environments, handles modifications, and performs upselling
• In-car purchasing — a driver confirms their usual coffee order by voice, payment is processed before arrival
• Reservations and payments — parking, restaurant tables, movie tickets — everything by voice without clicking

Competition and market position

SoundHound is not alone in the conversational AI space. Tech giants like Google (Gemini), Amazon (Alexa), and Apple (Siri) are investing billions into voice assistants. The key difference is focus: while Alexa or Google Assistant are general-purpose consumer assistants, SoundHound delivers specialized B2B solutions for specific industries — automotive, hospitality, insurance, or healthcare.

In the enterprise AI space, it also competes with companies like C3.ai, which is expanding into defense and manufacturing, or BigBear.ai, which focuses on government contracts and security. However, SoundHound has an advantage in vertical specialization — its models were trained on real interactions in cars and restaurants, which took years, and competitors cannot quickly replicate that.

According to a company survey from June 2026, 96% of organizations report that deploying agentic AI met or exceeded ROI expectations.

What does this mean for Europe and the Czech Republic?

SoundHound currently has no direct presence on the Czech market, but its partnerships with automakers — including European Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat, Opel) — mean this technology could reach cars that Czechs actually buy. Stellantis is among SoundHound's investors and customers and is integrating its voice platform into its infotainment systems.

From a European regulatory perspective, the EU AI Act is an important context, as it classifies AI systems by risk level. Voice assistants and transactional systems fall into categories requiring transparency and safety guarantees. SoundHound, with its emphasis on human-in-the-loop — meaning a person can intervene in a conversation when the AI encounters a problem — has an edge in this regard over fully autonomous systems.

The restaurant branch is also interesting for the Czech market. Currently, widely adopted voice ordering in drive-thrus is missing in the Czech Republic — if SoundHound decided to expand into Central Europe, it could target local fast-food chains or gas stations.

Investment appetite and outlook

SoundHound's stock has gained 31.5% over the last three months, while the overall sector declined by 10.2%. The forward P/S ratio of 27.21× is significantly above the industry average (16.99×), reflecting investor expectations that Voice Commerce and the OASYS platform will kickstart a new wave of growth.

The key question remains whether Voice Commerce can be transformed from pilot projects into a widely adopted technology. If so, SoundHound could play a similar role in the voice economy as PayPal did in online payments — becoming the infrastructure layer onto which other services are built.