With listening to music and watching TV becoming more social experiences, the Facebook app will be updated with audio recognition.

These days, few people watch TV shows or listen to music alone. Not in the figurative sense anyway. Audio service last.fm is a good example of the latter, with the website and app including software called the ‘Scrobbler’ which ‘scrobbles’ the music that you’re having a song and dance to on your phone, tablet or laptop and shares it with your friends and last.fm network. On the TV side of things, people livetweet and share images about the TV shows that entertain them for 20 minutes or more, making the stationary water cooler moments a global, more easily accessible experience; without a water cooler or a workplace in sight. Now, Facebook is looking to build on that, now announcing plans to add audio recognition to its official app.

Not only will the Facebook app allow you to identify the song or TV show by hearing it with your device’s microphone, in the case of music it will allow you to share clips of the track directly to Facebook. The songs will show up on your profile as a 30 second clip from either Rdio, Spotify or Deezer and if you don’t have an account with one of those audio services or if you don’t have a preference, Facebook will select one for you at random. Meanwhile, the information that you can share about TV shows even comes down to series episodes and titles meaning that you can better avoid spoilers by directly telling your Facebook friends which episode you’re watching.

An obvious concern about the app’s listening feature is what it will or won’t share. Thankfully, the feature is ‘opt-in’ meaning that you don’t have to switch it on if you don’t want to, thus avoiding some unfortunate mishaps when your friends realise that you like listening to Nickelback/Justin Bieber mashups. It’s unclear of the exact date when the update will be rolled out, but Facebook say that the update to the app will be available in the next few weeks so we’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Source: Facebook

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