Put a DJ in Your Car

With so many advancements being made in in-vehicle connectivity to the outside world, you might wonder if listening to music as you drive is a dying art. Far from it! Ford is now the first to launch the iHeartRadio app with voice control using SYNC® AppLink™.

At the heart of iHeartRadio, Clear Channel’s free digital radio service, are more than 800 popular live broadcast and digital-only stations as well as user-created custom stations. The SYNC-enabled iHeartRadio smartphone app can be accessed through simple voice commands in the growing number of Ford vehicles that now offer SYNC AppLink (10 for the 2012 model year!).

With the app, you can also start or stop a song, play local iHeartRadio stations and find traffic reports based on location through the phone’s GPS using simple voice commands or the buttons on the steering wheel, among other neat features.

The app allows you to use voice commands to find exactly what you want to listen to by saying “genre,” “city” or “personality” to search by type of music and location of station or host (no more turning dials!). iHeartRadio also connects users, hands-free through SYNC AppLink, to their Facebook Timelines, for sharing music with friends.

You want to hear other stations similar to what you’re already listening to? Say “recommend stations” or use the “my stations” command to listen to custom stations you’ve created or your favorite stations. While listening to custom stations, the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” commands can be used to like or skip songs. The content of custom stations can be further adjusted by saying “more discovery” or “less discovery” to restrict the playlist to more familiar tracks or to expose you to new music.

And another new, cool music offering from Ford is the TuneIn Radio app, also available for vehicles equipped with the SYNC AppLink, providing yet another listening option that can be controlled hands-free through voice commands.

TuneIn is a free service for listening to live local and global music, sports, talk and news, with more than 50,000 AM, FM, HD and Internet radio stations along with more than 1 million on-demand programs streaming from all over the world.

Using voice commands only, TuneIn allows you to search and listen to radio stations worldwide by artist or genre. For example, by saying, “explore genre,” you can select hundreds of genres of music or talk stations like classic rock or German talk. Search geographically by saying “explore location.” TuneIn will then rank the most popular stations from the chosen location and start playing. More than 250 locations from around the world can be accessed via voice control.

TuneIn is available in 10 languages and on more than 150 devices across all major smartphones and tablets, connected home stereos, smart TVs, car dashboards and online at www.tunein.com. The SYNC-enabled version of TuneIn Radio soon will be available through the iTunes App Store.

Visit ford.com to learn more about SYNC AppLink

Source: Ford Social