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Forget which song you’re jamming out to or curious about which track just started playing? If you’ve got Amazon’s Alexa queuing up your tunes, you’re in luck. Amazon Music today detailed Song ID, a new opt-in feature that lets Echo smart speaker users ask Alexa to announce the title and artist name before each song plays. It’ll roll out starting today for Amazon Music customers in the U.S.
Amazon’s pitching Song ID — which can be controlled by saying “Alexa, turn on Song ID” or “Alexa, turn off Song ID” — as a music, station, playlist, and chart discovery service for Alexa users. Customers already ask Alexa devices “hundreds of thousands” of questions per day to find out more about the music they’re hearing (e.g., “Alexa, what song is this?” and “Alexa, who sings this song?”), the Seattle company says, and this is a natural extension of the metadata it already provides.
“[Song ID was] developed to aid in music discovery while listening to stations, playlists, new releases, and more on a smart speaker,” an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. “[It] acts as a personal DJ, aid[ing] in both music enjoyment and recall for future playback.”
It’s not the only music-centric feature to hit Echo devices in recent months.
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In December, Alexa gained a dialogue-driven Amazon Music search feature that lets you find new playlists through voice. (Saying “Alexa, help me find a playlist” or “Alexa, help me find a holiday playlist” gets the voice assistant to ask a few questions about genre, occasion, mood, tempo, and songs on Alexa-enabled speakers.) Coinciding with that rollout, Alexa became better tailored to individual tastes; it now considers play count, era, favorite genres, and other factors when you ask to hear a track, and you can tell Amazon’s voice assistant to never play a particular song again.
Song ID also follows on the heels of the Music Skill API, which enables developers to stream songs from online services to Alexa devices and Amazon Echo speakers in the U.S. November 2018, meanwhile, saw the launch of New Release Notifications, which lets you follow artists and receive notifications when new songs or records become available on Amazon Music. And last summer Amazon introduced the ability to add music or live radio to Alexa Routines, including music from a specific artist, playlist, album, or station or from streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.
