The just launched Midomi search engine combines voice search with a social network. Anyone with a microphone hooked to their computer can search or add to the database by singing, humming or whistling their favorite tune. Midomi uses a proprietary Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System (MARS) Search developed by Melodis Corporation. According to Melodis, the MARS Search analyzes each element independently and adapts to the stronger components. For instance, MARS Search takes speech content into account if the user sings the lyrics and ignores speech content if the user hums or whistles the song.
There is a social networking component to the site. Users who have created a profile can sing their favorite songs, share them with others and add them to the search engine’s music database. Midomi.com provides users a system to rate the performances of other users, view their photos, and send them messages.
This new entrant joins a rapidly filling market, for earlier this month we wrote about Nayio, another voice search engine. VentureBeat offers results of their testing and concludes that Midomi is the stronger entrant with a better recognition algorithm.