Amazon has introduced a new feature to its personable Alexa voice assistant designed to help Echo owners discover new songs and artists. Dubbed Song ID, the optional feature turns the AI assistant into your own personal Smashie and Nicey – announcing the title of the track and the artist at the beginning of a song.
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For now, the feature only works with Amazon Music, which is the first music streaming service to introduce this type of feature to a smart speaker
According to Amazon, Echo owners ask Alexa questions like “Alexa, what song is this?” and “Alexa, who sings this song?” thousands of times every day, prompting its teams to build the new Song ID feature to pre-empt the requests.
Song ID is entirely optional and can be enabled and disabled using the voice commands “Alexa, turn on Song ID” or “Alexa, turn off Song ID” respectively. Of course, the feature is almost completely redundant if you own an Alexa-enabled device with a touchscreen, like the Echo Show, Echo Show 5 and Echo Dot, since these already display the name of the artist and track whenever music is playing.
Amazon will play playlists and albums you might never have heard before when you ask the assistant "Alexa, play". The music selection is always based on your listening history on Echo devices, or using any of the Amazon Music apps.
Doubling down on helping its users unearth new artists and songs, Amazon Music has also introducing new schemes to help listeners uncover up-and-coming artists, dubbed “Ones to Watch” and “Weekly One”. The former includes diverse artists across a number of different genres, showcasing the new music acts Amazon Music tips for big things in the year ahead.
Meanwhile, “Weekly One” is a program designed to give developing artists an opportunity to reach broader audiences and become more discoverable to customers at the very start of their careers through additional programming opportunities across original content, marketing, and more.
