The next time you’re wanting to belt your heart, Apple has you sorted with its new karaoke-like feature. Announced overnight, Apple Music Sing adjusts the vocals on a song and shows you its real-time lyrics so you can sing along.
The feature lets you choose between multiple lyric views so you can take the lead, perform a duet or sing backup. It’ll be available for tens of millions of tunes on Apple Music.
“We already know our users all over the world love to follow along to their favorite songs, so we wanted to evolve this offering even further to enable even more engagement around music through singing,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice-president of Apple Music and Beats. “It’s really a lot of fun, our customers are going to love it.”
Related: Apple Is Introducing Big Changes to Voice Controls, Starting With What You Call Siri
Related: Google Throws Shade at Apple… Using an iPhone
So, how exactly will it work? Well, for starters, you’ll be able to control the song’s vocal levels, turning them up or, if you’d prefer to only hear your own voice, down. Next, you’ll be able to turn on animated lyrics that’ll dance to the rhythm of the vocals.
Prefer to sing only backup vocals? Vocals sung simultaneously will animate independently from the main vocals to make it easier for users to follow. Keen to sing a duet? The different lyrics can be shown on opposite sides of the screen to make it easier to duet.
If you’re not sure what to sing to, along with the new feature, Apple Music will also be a suite of more than 50 dedicated companion playlists that’ll include songs, duets, choruses and anthems that it recommends for karaoke.
Apple Music Sing will be available later in December for Apple Music subscribers worldwide.
Last month, it was rumoured that Apple was looking to change its hands-free, digital voice assistant experience so that it’ll be prompted by “Siri”, instead of “Hey Siri”.
According to Apple insider Mark Gurman of Bloomberg News, the change is currently being tested by Apple employees.
“The company is working on an initiative to drop the ‘Hey’ in the trigger phrase so that a user only needs to say ‘Siri’ — along with a command,” wrote Gurman in his Power On newsletter. “While that might seem like a small change, making the switch is a technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work.”
Gurman reported that the tech giant has been working on the change for several months, testing the simplified wake word with its employees and collecting the necessary training data. If all goes to plan, it should roll out the switch either next year or the year after.
Read more stories from The Latch and subscribe to our email newsletter.