Facebook’s Android & iOS App Will Be Able To Identify Songs & TV Shows Instantly

To complement “feelings and activity” status updates, Facebook has added an optional feature to its Android and iOS apps that lets them identify the song you are listening to or the TV show you are watching. The feature which will be rolled out to iPhone and Android users residing in US can be activated while composing a status message. The app listens to the audio playing in the background with the help of the phone’s microphone and once it finds a match in its database it allows you to add it to the status update.


If your status update is about a song then your friends can listen in to a thirty second preview powered by music streaming services like Rdio, Spotify or Deezer. The charm of the app however lies in its ability to be able to recognise not just the TV show but also the season and episode number. The app is also able to detect live TV shows like news and sporting events. To find out how the app was able to recognise audio so quickly, #-Link-Snipped-#’s Nicole Lee talked to Aryeh Selekman, product manager at Facebook who explained that the audio recognition algorithm was developed indigenously by folks at the company. The audio being received by the app gets converted to unique codes on a millisecond basis and then these codes are then used to identify the content.


To address privacy concerns, Facebook has informed that the audio recordings from your phone’s microphone are never stored on its servers and as always you get the option of choosing the people you share the status with.

So if there are any CE users residing in the US, we would like them to use this feature and inform us about its efficiency in the comment section below. Users residing elsewhere have to be content with the video demonstration below.


Source: #-Link-Snipped-#