Talk to Your Tunes

03.02.05 Total posts: 1

By John R. Quain, eWEEK

Life may be random, but your music doesn`t have to be. Even though Apple thinks ``shuffle`` is a virtue in a portable music player, some users prefer to focus on songs of their own choosing. Finding the right tune on a hard drive containing thousands of tracks, however, can exasperate any thumb-wheel jockey. So Gracenote and ScanSoft are developing a way for digital music players to obey voice commands.

``The user interface is really the point of pain, so speech is a great way to enable a search path,`` explains Alan Schwartz, a VP at ScanSoft.

Locating the right track for the right mood—Miles Davis for a quiet moment or the Hives for a raucous subway ride—is trying with a tiny LCD screen and menu. By contrast, ScanSoft`s speaker-independent speech-recognition engine would let you simply say ``Play all my Beatles songs`` to get the Fab Four to commence.

But getting an MP3 player to understand ``INXS`` or ``Sade`` is a hurdle. So ScanSoft is working with music-database firm Gracenote to ``fix the more challenging pronunciations,`` says Ross Blanchard, a Gracenote VP. The partnership also means that the speech engine can be tied into Grace- note`s metadata, which includes musical genre and geographic region data for over 43 million songs. ``So you could be listening to the Meat Puppets, and say `more like this,``` explains Blanchard, and the player would compose a playlist with your Minutemen and Bob Mould recordings.

The two companies aim to license the software late this year. Gracenote already provides the music-library information for jukeboxes like Apple`s iTunes, but the company declined to cite any music-player partners yet. ScanSoft, which also makes Dragon NaturallySpeaking, has its speech-recognition software in some Pioneer car navigation systems. Indeed, both companies see the future of music moving well beyond the iPod.