South by Southwest, also known as SXSW, is happening right now in Austin, Texas, and while there’s not a ton of mobile news coming out of the festival, Samsung did drop a couple of tidbits today.
Samsung has announced Hum On! and Waffle, two new apps that are part of its C-Lab, which it describes as “an innovation program that helps its employees nurture their own creative business ideas.” Hum On! is an app that can take your hummed melodies, transcribe them into musical notation, and then play them back in an R&B, classical, or rock style. You’re then free to do with them as you wish, including sharing with friends.
When you hum into the Hum On! app, software works to determine the pitch and duration of your hum and then uses machine learning to decide the best accompaniment for your tune. Samsung’s team is working on improving the recognition accuracy of Hum On! and is considering working with musicians to add more accompaniments to the app in the future.
Meanwhile, Waffle is touted as a “content-sharing application” that looks a bit like a social network in which users can contribute photos and doodles to a feed of a certain topic. In a video demo, one user starts a grid for a friend’s birthday, and then several other friends contribute with a photo of a cake, a selfie, and more. The goal is to offer “multiple points of view to generate a collaborative story” on a certain topic.
Sharing images and content to a social network is nothing new, and the grid of images in Waffle looks a bit reminiscent of the grid of photos in Instagram. With Waffle, though, it looks like Samsung wants you and your friends to create parts of one larger image or “a collaborative story.” Now we just have to wait and see if Samsung ends up releasing Waffle to the public. The company’s intro video mentions a beta app on Google Play, but so far I haven’t actually found any app that’s available.