French start-up Prizm was recognized at CES 2016, the second year the company attends the show, following its successful crowdfunding campaign in 2014. Prizm developed a new kind of learning music player that can be plugged to any speakers, recognizes people in the room and plays music according to their tastes. This year, the device was awarded the prestigious CES Innovation Award in the Smart Home category.
Prizm designed a simple music playing device that can be connected to any speakers or sound system and intuitively plays the perfect music according to our music library and preferences or based on people in the room, their music tastes and habits, and even the current atmosphere. Whether the user is alone at home, with family, or partying with friends, Prizm understands the context and predicts the music people want to hear.
Prizm was developed by a Paris-based start-up founded in 2013 by Pierre Gochgarian (Chief Marketing Officer), Arthur Eberhardt (CTO), Olivier Roberdet (R&D Director), and Pierre Verdu (Art Director). The company launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in October 2014. The project reached its target and raised more than $70,000 in four days, reaching $161,000 on the platform.Now, Prizm received the CES Innovation Award in the Smart Home category, recognizing the concept which will be soon introduced to the market. The device reinvents the way we listen to music at home and is extremely ease to use. All the user needs to do is press Play and the music starts automatically. Every time we press the like icon (a heart) Prizm improves the music selection, like any other software player. If a song is not to our taste, we can press the cross button to skip to the next one. The idea here is to avoid using a computer or smartphone, to browse an app or a website, every time we simple want to have music playing - and there are many users who simply don’t like to have to deal with that. Prizm itself recognizes the right music for the moment, according to the user’s tastes and listening habits.
But Prizm also analyses what’s happening around, recognizing people present and sensing the overall atmosphere to adjust the music selection automatically. “It’s a unique intelligence in the audio field. Nobody offers this today,” says Olivier Roberdet. Prizm´s algorithms take advantage of the abundance of streaming platform catalogs. Once connected to the speakers via the 3.5mm jack, optical or Bluetooth, and to an existing streaming account via Wi-Fi, Prizm browses millions of titles to find the best music. Each time we interact with Prizm, it memorizes our choices in order to play music we like. It will understand that we prefer listening to rock in the morning and jazz at night. The personalized music stream generated by Prizm becomes more relevant over time, custom-tailored to the user’s habits.
It also automatically detects people in the room via their smartphone or connected wristbands and analyzes the ambient atmosphere taking into account the day, hour and sound volume. This is how Prizm is able to establish the difference between a romantic dinner and an evening with friends and chooses music to fit the situation. “We believe that the listening experience is deeply linked to the context. We do not want to listen to the same music when we are doing housework for example or when we we have friends over than when we are alone or with our better half,”, explains Pierre Gochgarian, Prizm’s CEOFor the moment, Prizm connects to music streaming services like Soundcloud or Deezer but the French company is expanding its reach to further services like Spotify. Prizm has been designed to operate as a standalone device - it does not stream music from our phone or any other device - but it can still be controlled using the dedicated app (iOS, Android) and it is also possible to play a title, a musical genre or an artist of choice using the app as a remote control. All our interactions can be linked to our streaming accounts. The major difference is that Prizm is context-aware.
“We realized that music is deeply linked to the context: you do not listen to the same music when you are working or when you are sharing a drink with friends, when you are waking up, and when you come back from work,” explains Olivier Roberdet. “Prizm leverages your streaming music accounts to create a dynamic music feed, consistent with the room context, without you having to choose what to play. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, Prizm understands what you like and when you like it.”
Prizm should reach the market in 2016 and can be pre-ordered for 149 Euros.
www.meetprizm.com
