New Song ID Feature Of Alexa Can Tell You What’s The Next Song

Yesterday, Amazon launched its new feature for Alexa, which is called “Song ID.” With this feature, Amazon wants to assist users in discovering music they like.

When enabled, before playing a song, Alexa will notify users the title of the song as well as the artist name. This feature will be available when you listen to Amazon Music’s new release, playlist, or radio station via your smart speaker.

This feature also comes optional, which means you can toggle its on or off at any time through voice command. You can just simply ask Alexa to “turn on/turn off Song ID.”

When you listen to music through desktop or mobile apps, it is easy to quickly glance at the app to know the title of the song or the artist’s name. But when you use a smart speaker, it is a whole different situation. Your device may not be around and easily accessible. And it’s not similar to a terrestrial radio which has a DJ to tell you what song is next.

This new feature turns Alexa into that kind of DJ, but with less personality. This DJ can only announce the title of the upcoming song and the artist playing it. It does not give any comments or any other information about the music.

That actually could actually be an exciting expansion for Song ID in the coming future, if Amazon decided to go down that route. It could be an Alexa-powered equivalent to the Genius-based “Behind the Lyrics” of Spotify, which provides you with some stories on songs.

It was users’ music-related requests made to Alexa that inspired Amazon to build this Song ID feature.

Each day, the assistant receives “hundreds of thousands” questions from users about the song being played, for example, “Alexa, who sings this song? Or “Alexa, what song is this,” and many more.

The company also says that this feature could come in handy when you are listening to music from new artists whose names and songs you may not have known, for instance, developing artists featured in Amazon Music’s Weekly One program or 2019 Artists to Watch.

Amazon announces that the new feature is available starting from March 7 on Amazon Music within the U.S. and it works on all Echo devices.