Parrot Asteroid Gets Gracenote Tech

The world of in-car entertainment will never be the same starting this year, as two of the biggest players on the market, Parrot and Gracenote, joined hands to provide a new generation of the former's Asteroid connected car stereo.

Gracenote will supply the French built system with its digital file recognition and speech-enhancing technologies or, more specifically, the MediaVOCS and Playlist Plus. The former identifies digital songs on connected devices (it is even capable of recognizing inconsistent spellings, repetitions and nicknames in a digital music collection), while the latter is a control toll, allowing for accurate voice recognition capabilities for music search, navigation and playback.

The Asteroid will also be a test for Gracenote's MediaVOCS, being the first use of the technology in the real world as an after-market product. The two systems work in conjunction, making them easy to use for the future customers.

"By using Gracenote's technology we were able to greatly improve the accuracy, performance, latency and ready time of the speech recognition capabilities for Asteroid," said Frederic Albinet, product marketing manager, automotive business unit, Parrot.

"We conducted extensive testing of MediaVOCS versus standard speech recognition capabilities and we found a full 30 percent improvement of artist name recognition over other technology offerings. We are very impressed with the technology and for us, choosing to work with Gracenote was an easy decision."

The system is being presented at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, together with a concept “Car of the Future” packed by Gracenote with all its latest.