Gracenote Powers Album Cover Art and Enhances Voice Control in Next Generation of Ford SYNC

EMERYVILLE, Calif., Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Gracenote® today announced three of its products are powering the next generation of Ford Motor Company's award-winning SYNC®, a fully integrated platform for Ford vehicles and a technology that will become the global interior architecture for all future Ford products.  Gracenote's Playlist Plus™, MediaVOCS™, and Cover Art offerings are all incorporated into the groundbreaking SYNC system, offering Ford drivers exceptional voice and graphical control over their media on iPods, MP3 players, USB & SD cards and Bluetooth audio devices

Gracenote's MediaVOCS allows drivers to navigate, discover and play their connected digital media collections in the car using voice commands with more accuracy than is possible with standard speech technology alone.  MediaVOCS enables voice recognition and speech synthesis of problematic and alternative artist and album names, thereby significantly improving the entire music playback experience.  For instance, with MediaVOCS the system will recognize an artist nickname like "The Boss" for Bruce Springsteen, or an unobvious pronunciation like "Play Artist Sade", or an abbreviated artist name like "Play Artist CCR" for Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Gracenote's Playlist Plus allows drivers to clean up and organize song metadata and easily generate automatic playlists in the vehicle, and works seamlessly with MediaVOCS to enable a simpler and safer music management and enjoyment experience for drivers. Utilizing the custom Gracenote classifications, drivers can create instant and intelligent "similar music" playlists with a single button or voice command.  Specifically in the next generation of SYNC, misspelled, abbreviated or missing metadata is corrected using Playlist Plus, which in turn enables accurate playlisting and music navigation in the vehicle. Users have the option to navigate their music with their original, familiar metadata or Gracenote's normalized and extended metadata, while reaping all the benefits of the underlying, normalized and extended metadata in either case.

To complete the solution, the processing of a user's media collection by Playlist Plus then enables SYNC to display licensed album cover art from Gracenote. Ford drivers will now be able to navigate their music via a 3-D carousel of album cover art from an integrated database of licensed cover art scans, as well as view the related cover art for a currently playing track even when there is no cover art on the original connected media.

"We are pleased to be providing our products to Ford for its next generation of SYNC, a powerful and intuitive system that is providing a truly unique entertainment experience for drivers," said Bill Fleck, Head of Automotive Sales, Americas at Gracenote. "The combination of accurate and flexible voice control to navigate the car's music library coupled with the album cover art and metadata management we are providing will bring ease of use and enjoyment of in-car entertainment to the next level."

About Gracenote

A pioneer in the digital media industry, Gracenote combines information, technology, services and applications to create ingenious entertainment solutions for the global market. From media management, enrichment and discovery products to content identification technologies, Gracenote allows providers of digital media products and the content community to make their offerings more powerful and intuitive, enabling superior consumer experiences. The company's solutions integrate the broadest, deepest, and highest quality global metadata and enriched content with an infrastructure that services billions of searches a month from thousands of products used by hundreds of millions consumers. Gracenote's customers include the biggest names in the consumer electronics, mobile, automotive, software and Internet industries. The company's partners in the entertainment community include major music publishers and labels, prominent independents and movie studios. Gracenote, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, is headquartered in Emeryville, California. www.gracenote.com.

Gracenote is a registered trademarks of Gracenote, Inc. All other names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Gracenote