Apple has confirmed its acquisition of music recognition service, Shazam. The deal has been on the cards for a while - Apple actually announced the purchase back in December 2017 - but it's now official.
"Apple and Shazam have a long history together. Shazam was one of the first apps available when we launched the App Store and has become a favorite app for music fans everywhere," said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music.
"With a shared love of music and innovation, we are thrilled to bring our teams together to provide users even more great ways to discover, experience and enjoy music."
There are some potentially interesting moves Apple could now make with Shazam officially under its wing.
Google's Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL handsets can display the current song playing in your environment (even if it's not from your phone) on the always-on ambient display, and it wouldn't surprise us if Apple offered something similar on iPhone.
It could also improve Siri's song recognition feature, which already uses Shazam, with a deeper integration between the two.
While those would be nice features to have, what Apple is more likely interested in is the machine learning capabilities of Shazam's platform.
The service's impressive ability to quickly and accurately determine what song is playing with just a few seconds of audio means it has some serious smarts behind it.
As Apple continues to build its own neural engine, the intelligence of Shazam could well be a useful addition to a much bigger picture for the firm.
Launched in the UK in 2002, Shazam was originally known as '2580', as those were the four digits you needed to dial to make a call to the service which would listen for 30 seconds and then text you the song details.
Fast forward to 2018 and Shazam is not only a popular smartphone app often requiring less than 5 seconds of audio to recognize a song, it's also built into a range of other devices and services, and is known the world over.
Found on: TechRadar
