Nuance’s VoCon Music Premium could kit Siri out with Gracenote’s music database
Think Siri is smart now? Just wait a little longer and Apple's Virtual Assistant could be able to play you almost any music you can think of
Nuance, the company responsible for developing Apple’s Siri personal assistant has announced a partnership with Gracenote, giving it access to a gargantuan database of music, films, videos and TV shows.
The partnership will first bear fruit in the form of VoCon Music Premium, a service which will “combine Nuance’s voice and language understanding technologies with Gracenote’s MediaVOCS database of phonetic transcriptions for artists and albums.”
Nuance, of course, provides the speech recognition for Apple’s Virtual Assistant, Siri. While Siri’s currently able to play back songs stored on your iPhone 4S, if Apple opts to bolt VoCon Music Premium onto Siri you’d be able to use natural language to request any song – streamed off the iCloud onto your iPhone 4S with a Spotify-like subscription service.
VoCon Music Premium’s initially intended for use in cars, but given Apple’s past history with Nuance, it’s no big stretch to imagine Apple kitting out Siri with the service – watch this space.
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Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief