Do you remember Rock Band?
When we were college roommates, this was our favorite dorm room game. For our first Volley office, we even purchased a used Rock Band set on Ebay for around $400 to introduce the game to our teammates.
We drew joy from its mock guitar, bass, and drum set, but it was the pitch-based singing mode that set it apart and required us to learn the exact vocal arrangements of songs from artists like Weezer and The Ramones.
In the years since, we’ve dreamed of creating a modern pitch-matching karaoke game for TVs—but the technology to make this work didn’t quite exist. To host a karaoke night at home still required a gaming console with expensive peripherals or dedicated karaoke equipment.
We're excited to share that with our new Karaoke release, we’ve now made it possible to host a competitive and rollicking karaoke night on Roku TVs with no extra hardware.
To play, download the Volley app on Roku. Your Roku Voice Remote doubles as your microphone, or you can use your phone if your TV remote doesn’t support voice input.
Sing along with lyrics on the screen and get real-time feedback on how well you’re hitting each note!
As you sing, your pitch is tracked in real time, earning you points for hitting each note and building your streak. You can also challenge your friends by singing the same songs and comparing scores.
With more than 50 song choices, including hits from Britney Spears, Dolly Parton, and Queen, Karaoke has a deep library.
Our hope is that the game surfaces the future American Idols lurking within your home. At the very least, you’ll end the night with haunting memories of cringe-worthy performances and an unshakeable resolve to never again try to sing Hello by Adele in public.
Curious about how we finally made real-time pitch-matching possible on television hardware? Here's a behind-the-scenes look at this technical achievement:
Building for low-powered devices: TVs are typically low-powered from a CPU and memory perspective. While great for streaming and basic apps, these devices aren’t generally equipped to handle the intensive machine learning tasks required for real-time pitch detection and analysis. To solve for this, we offloaded this heavy lifting to our cloud infrastructure.
Optimizing for minimal latency: When it comes to providing real-time feedback on your singing, relying on the cloud comes with its own set of challenges. We optimized the connection between the TV and our cloud infrastructure to minimize any delays and we added several hundred milliseconds of scoring forgiveness. We also made tweaks to the visual UI to reduce any perception of latency for the player. The result is that the game feels smooth, highly responsive, and fair!
Custom song database: To achieve precise pitch matching and perfectly timed lyrics, we needed highly detailed metadata for each song’s vocal track. Existing resources didn’t meet our requirements, so we opted to develop our own custom metadata package for every song available in the game. We wrote our own algorithms to generate the associated pitch data and lyrical timings we need for each track. Today, we have over 50 songs available on Karaoke with this custom metadata.
At Volley, we strive to make family game nights fun and effortless for all ages. Often that means embracing the hardware our customers already own—despite the associated technical challenges. We’re really proud of what our team is shipping today.
If you’re a Roku owner, install the Volley app, fire up your TV, and get ready to belt out your favorite tunes with Volley Karaoke. We’ve been having a blast testing this game at Volley happy hours. We hope you’ll enjoy playing it as much as we have.
