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Pandora brings its in-app voice assistant to all users to play music, adjust volume, thumb up songs, more

Pandora has released its in-app voice assistant today to give iOS users a more streamlined experience. The Voice Mode offers an easy way to play your music, thumb up or thumb down tracks, change the volume, identify songs, and more.

Pandora announced the news in a press release today:

Pandora’s Voice Mode combines advanced voice-recognition and Natural Language Processing tech with Pandora’s Music Genome Project personalization technology (the most sophisticated taxonomy of music annotation), so that users can talk conversationally with Pandora as specific or vague as they want.

If you want to test out the new in-app voice assistant, open up Pandora on your iPhone or iPad, then tap the search bar. Tap the microphone in the search bar to activate Voice Mode, and give the app permission to use your device’s microphone.

Now you’ll be able to use the feature by saying “Hey, Pandora.” In our limited testing, the voice assistant works pretty well but wasn’t overly consistent at recognizing the hotword when music was playing.

Ways to use Pandora’s Voice Mode:

  •  “Hey, Pandora: play some music to start my day.”
  •  “Hey, Pandora: play more like this.”
  •  “Hey Pandora: add this to my slow jams playlist.”
  •  “Hey, Pandora: play the latest Kevin Hart podcast.”
  •  “Hey, Pandora: play something happy for cooking.”
  •  “Hey, Pandora: play the song that goes ‘Snakes and stones never break my bones.’” (Taylor Swift)
  •  “Hey, Pandora: turn it all the way up!”

Pandora is a free download from the App Store.

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Avatar for Michael Potuck Michael Potuck

Michael is an editor for 9to5Mac. Since joining in 2016 he has written more than 3,000 articles including breaking news, reviews, and detailed comparisons and tutorials.