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Is Shazam really ML/AI/DL? I thought it was more of a signal processing and search engine system. You transform snippets of audio signals into text, pump it into a distributed database, and then perform a search against that. Maybe there is some AI involved in noise reduction, but that seems like a rather small component.


They do audio fingerprinting[1], so no ML/AI in the core feature.

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[1]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf


"Music information retrieval" is what researchers call the overarching field. You might say the Shazam algorithm is akin to those fields in the sense that it relies on feature extraction. It's possible they may train a classifier to do the matching, but yeah, probably not purely ML/AI/DL.


They do something that gets results. It doesn't matter if it's ML, AI, DL, linear regression, or just fingerprint+cosine similarity. There's some talent for getting some complex shit done.




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