Apple iOS 8 Adds Hands Free Shazam Song Recognition, But No Beats Surprises
Monday's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote was filled with major updates, but despite a call to Dr. Dre demoing a new non-music product, only one announcement was of major significance to the music industry.
As rumored, Apple's new iOS8 includes hands free song recognition via Shazam. Utilizing Apple's Siri hands free voice recognition system, users can ask Shazam to identify a song and, if they chose. purchase it on iTunes. Siri now accepts voice commands in 22 languages.
Siri + Shazam + Beats Music
Presumably, when the just-purchased Beats Music streaming music service is integrated into the Apple echo-system, Siri will be able to Shazam a song and also add it to a user's Beats playlist. Given the restrictions that Apple usually puts on outside apps, this sure-to-be-popular feature will next to impossible for Spotify and other competitors to duplicate on iOS devices.
Let your imagination go and Apple's $3.2 billion purchase of Beats Electronics and Beats Music starts to make sense…
Trying to play catchup to google me thinks. Hey google whats this song, it tells you the song and finds it in the playstore then lets you pay with google wallet! Nothing new here!!!!