If you’ve decided to succumb to the pressure from Windows to upgrade your computer’s operating system to Windows 10, then you now have access to Microsoft’s AI assistant, Cortana. Did you know that Cortana’s many skills include song recognition, just like the Shazam app?
Shazam, which was founded in 1999 and became one of the top ten apps in 2013, can recognize a song based on a short clip of music. Having Shazam installed on your smartphone gave you the power to recognize songs played in grocery stores and on the radio. These days, you might not need to open the Shazam app anymore, because of the newfound music-matching skills of Cortana and the rest of her AI counterparts (Siri on the iPhone and Google Now on the Android).
Don’t pity the Shazam developers, though. Siri’s song-matching abilities are powered by Shazam; you don’t need to open the app or even have it installed, you can just ask Siri about the song and she’ll use Shazam’s databases to obtain that info. Google Now for the Android has its own song identification capabilities, though, and so does Microsoft’s Cortana. As for whether they’re better at this than Shazam, well … more testing is needed to determine that.
Before now, Cortana lived inside the Windows Phone, which very few people own, so you probably didn’t realize how helpful she could be. Now that she’s a part of Windows 10, you might take this opportunity to get to know her better.
Still, music-matching seems like something that comes up when you’re on the go rather than sitting at a computer. There’s the occasional time when you’ll want to recognize a song in a YouTube video, but more often than not, you’ll need to figure it out on your phone. That said, if you’ve already upgraded to Windows 10, you may as well see how Cortana’s musical knowledge stacks up in comparison to whatever you used before.
(via Make Use Of, image via How To Geek)
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