Contrasting BIO-key International (NASDAQ:BKYI) & SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN)

BIO-key International (NASDAQ:BKYI) and SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN) are both technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, profitability, analyst recommendations, dividends, institutional ownership, valuation and risk.

Profitability

This table compares BIO-key International and SoundHound AI’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
BIO-key International	-50.01%	-67.31%	-40.28%
SoundHound AI	-67.45%	-30.22%	-20.28%

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares BIO-key International and SoundHound AI”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
BIO-key International	$6.70 million	0.80	-$7.16 million	($4.11)	-0.64
SoundHound AI	$168.92 million	12.41	-$14.01 million	($0.38)	-12.42

BIO-key International has higher earnings, but lower revenue than SoundHound AI. SoundHound AI is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than BIO-key International, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Volatility and Risk

BIO-key International has a beta of 0.5, indicating that its share price is 50% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, SoundHound AI has a beta of 2.73, indicating that its share price is 173% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and price targets for BIO-key International and SoundHound AI, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
BIO-key International	1	1	0	0	1.50
SoundHound AI	1	2	3	1	2.57

SoundHound AI has a consensus target price of $12.75, indicating a potential upside of 170.13%. Given SoundHound AI’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe SoundHound AI is more favorable than BIO-key International.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

26.5% of BIO-key International shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 19.3% of SoundHound AI shares are held by institutional investors. 4.0% of BIO-key International shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 8.8% of SoundHound AI shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

SoundHound AI beats BIO-key International on 11 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About BIO-key International

BIO-key International, Inc. develops and markets fingerprint identification biometric technology and software solutions, and enterprise-ready identity access management solutions for commercial, government, and education customers in the United States and internationally. The company offers BIO-key PortalGuard and PortalGuard IDaaS solutions, a customer-controlled and neutral-by-design cloud-based identity platform that allows customers to integrate with any cloud or on-premises SaaS application, as well as windows device authentication through IAM platform. Its solutions enable its customers to secure their workforces and student populations; and make their partner networks more collaborative. In addition, it provides BIO-key VST and WEB-key products; and Civil and Large-Scale ID Infrastructure solutions that develops finger-based biometric technology. Further, it offers finger scanners for enterprise and consumer markets under SideSwipe, EcoID, and SidePass brand names. The company was formerly known as SAC Technologies and changed its name to BIO-key International, Inc. in 2002. BIO-key International, Inc. was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Wall, New Jersey.

About SoundHound AI

SoundHound AI, Inc. develops independent voice artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that enables businesses across automotive, TV, and IoT, and to customer service industries to deliver high-quality conversational experiences to their customers. Its products include Houndify platform that offers a suite of Houndify tools to help brands build conversational voice assistants, such as Application Programming Interfaces (API) for text and voice queries, support for custom commands, extensive library of content domains, inclusive software development kit platforms, collaboration capabilities, diagnostic tools, and built-in analytics; SoundHound Chat AI that integrates with knowledge domains, pulling real-time data like weather, sports, stocks, flight status, and restaurants; and SoundHound Smart Answering is built to offer customer establishments custom AI-powered voice assistant. The company's products also include CaiNET software that uses machine learning to enhance how domains work together to handle queries; CaiLAN software that arbitrates responses so users get answers from the right domain; Dynamic Interaction a real-time, multimodal customer service interface; Smart Ordering which offers an easy-to-understand voice assistant for restaurants; Employee Assist; automatic speech recognition; natural language understanding; wake words; custom domains; text-to-speech; and embedded voice solutions. The company was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.