Celebrities can recommend songs while you drive

One of the cooler and yet oddly scary things exhibited at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was Gracenote's new CarStars stereo system.

It's cool because you can choose to have a music celebrity recommend songs as you drive.

The scary part is the speech technology from Voxonic, which takes a celebrity's recorded words and renders them accurately into other languages. During my demo, I had Nick Ashford speaking to me in German, French and Japanese, and you know what? It sounded good. Voxonic also can manipulate Ashford's voice so he can say things in English that he never recorded. I'm told Voxonic can bring Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. back to life for an MC showdown, at least vocally.

The celebrity guide "looks" through your collection and tells you what songs he or she likes. Or the guide can tell you what songs you should have. CarStars can pull up new music through an Omnifone subscription account, which will come with the car.

CarStars also works with GPS so it can recommend music based on location or speed, for example, if you're stuck in traffic or speeding along the coast.

You can always turn off the recommendation system and just use Gracenote's voice recognition feature to call out an artist, track, album or genre to play.

Gracenote is working with all the major music labels and hopes to have most artists ready to go on the system when it comes out late next year. The price is not available, but will be factored into the price of a new car.

E-mail Ryan Kim at rkim(at)sfchronicle.com.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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