Facebook Launches Shazam-Like Music Identification Feature

Facebook announced a new feature that helps users identify the music or a TV show using the smartphone's microphone.

Facebook Inc., is adding a new technology to its mobile apps that identifies any music, movies or television show playing in the background. The main idea behind the new feature is to let users easily share what they are listening to on their news feed. Facebook for mobile will use the smartphone's microphone to identify the media content while a user is updating a status and once a match is found, it can be added to the status.

The new feature mimics the functionality of the popular music-recognition app Shazam and Sound Hound and the social networking site wants to focus more on media and entertainment. According to the company's blog post, Wednesday, more than 5 billion status updates included users' activities and feelings that led to conversations with friends.

"Today, we're making [conversations] quicker and easier by introducing a new way to share and discover music, TV and movies," Aryeh Selekman, product manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.

"When writing a status update - if you choose to turn the feature on - you'll have the option to use your phone's microphone to identify what song is playing or what show or movie is on TV," he continues. "That means if you want to share that you're listening to your favorite Beyoncé track or watching the season premiere of Game of Thrones, you can do it quickly and easily, without typing."

When a user shares the song on the social network feed, the new feature lets friends listen to a 30 second snippet of the song. Similarly for TV shows, the post adds the season and the episode info. But the new feature will be turned off by default and requires users to turn it on.

Facebook is slowly rolling out the new feature to mobile apps on Android and iOS in the coming weeks.

The social networking company has brought about several modifications to its service in recent months. Just this week, Facebook added an "Ask" button that allows people to ask others about their relationship status. Earlier last month, mobile apps were updated with Nearby Friends to let users see their friends' whereabouts in a given radius using the GPS location.

Tags
Facebook, Launches, Shazam, Music, Identification, Feature
Real Time Analytics