Gracenote introduce several new partnerships and technologies at CES today to make voice-activated control of users’ music libraries in the car easier.
First, it unveiled a new technology called MediaVOCS, featured in the MyFord Touch voice-activated entertainment system, which lets fans search for and playback music for artists by using alternative names. So think saying “GNR” instead of Guns and Roses, or “Snoop” instead of Snoop Dogg, or even “The King” in place of Elvis and “The Fab Four” instead of the Beatles. The upgrade will be made available via an SD card to Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX models.
Additionally, Gracenote introduced the next generation of its Discover music recommendation technology. It uses the “sonic attributes” of songs — such as mood and tempo — as well as and music descriptors like genre, origin, era and artist type — to make track, artist and album recommendations to services using the technology. The first such parnter is European mobile music service Omnifone.