This article was published on February 27, 2013

This neat hack takes voice-search to Rdio via Google Chrome’s new Web Speech API


This neat hack takes voice-search to Rdio via Google Chrome’s new Web Speech API

Less than a week after Google launched Chrome 25 replete with voice-recognition support via the new Web Speech API, an interesting little hack has emerged from the Rdio community that taps this very feature.

Talk Radio takes voice-search to Rdio

Talk Radio takes Siri-esque functionality and replicates it in your browser, letting you request music on Rdio simply by talking.

When you hit the spacebar, the app will ask for permission to access your microphone.

b
You can then simply say ‘Play Music by [Artist Name]’, and it will automatically start playing clips of songs by that artist at random.

c

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Of course, this is just a proof of concept, and Rdio regularly encourages the developer community to partake in such projects via its API, the idea being they could eventually lead to fully-fledged features, or niche third-party apps.

dApparently, you should also be able to request genres of music, by uttering things like “Play indie pop”, but for me it always misheard what I said.

In addition to Google’s new Web Speech API, Talk Radio also taps The Echo Nest’s (see previous coverage) data-powered search function to arrive at the artist.

This isn’t the fist app to bring voice-search functionality to Rdio – we recently covered an iOS app called Vela Lite, which lets you search for music on Spotify and Rdio simply by saying a song, album or artist.

With the Talk Radio hack, however, this is more a show of technology and successfully demonstrates the all-new Chrome.

Talk Radio

Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock

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