With new technology developed by IBM, you will find life easier as you search for songs from a touch-screen panel.

To make karaoke fans' lives easier, IBM has collaborated with Xing Incorporated, a subsidiary of Brother Industries Ltd, to engineer, design and develop two new portable wireless karaoke controllers, called Kyoku-NAVIs and Kyoku-NAVI II, to replace the conventional karaoke song catalogue.

Kyoku-NAVIs is a remote controller, allowing karaoke customers to select a song from the control screen by name, by artist or from several genres, wirelessly. In addition, users can access a variety of content such as promotional videos and information on sports through the control screen. Kyoku-NAVI II adds more functions, to allow customers to order food and drink from the touch screen.

In the past, to choose a song, karaoke customers had to go through a thick catalogue to find the song they wanted, and then type in the number listed in the catalogue to order a song from the remote controller. The new wireless karaoke portable controllers ease the burden of searching and entering songs with the use of a touch-screen panel, IBM said.

As the technology is a joint development between IBM and Japanese-based Xing, it supports Japanese language. However, non-Japanese speaking customers have the option of doing a song search in English, Chinese or Korean.

The company said to enhance scalability and stability, a wireless LAN is incorporated into the new controllers, allowing high-speed transmission of songs and volumes of data, updated on demand within the controllers themselves.