Although it doesn’t seem much more than a “gee we’d sure like to be in the news again” move, Gracenote has declared their intention to build a voice-recognition system tailed specifically for navigating through thousands of songs while driving. The idea is to develop a system that can recognize idiosyncrasies in artists’ names (‘AC/DC,’ ‘311,’ KFDFM/GPRS’ etc.) and even queue contextual information so finding more music to which to rock could be as easy as ‘Computer: All ahead, shred..’ It’s a fine idea, but with no plans to even show the technology until 2006, other iPod-centric systems could end up supplanting Gracenote’s software before it even has a chance to be implemented.
Even more miraculous will be a system that will be able to cue Eminem’s latest hit in the year 2006. They must be dynamically generating songs or something.