Product · Entertainment venue platform
KY Karaoke
The complete software platform for commercial karaoke venues. Customers sing in private rooms on a touchscreen tablet, staff run the venue from a POS terminal, and admins manage the catalogue and tenants from a web dashboard — all driven by one realtime backend and a software karaoke engine built on machine-learning media processing.
Production rollout · Korea & Cambodia · Built and operated by XISLABS
- Apps
- Room tablet · POS · Backoffice · Backend
- Per song
- 6 ML-generated artifacts
- Catalogue
- ~112k-row song table
- Realtime
- ~40 socket event types
Why it exists
The problem KY Karaoke solves
The problem
Traditional karaoke venues depend on dedicated hardware boxes in every room: expensive, hard to update, locked to a vendor's catalogue, and blind to the rest of the business. Orders, room time, payments, and the music live in separate systems that never agree.
The product
KY Karaoke replaces the hardware with software. A machine-learning pipeline turns each song into playable artifacts — instrumental track, vocal stem, pitch data, and timed lyrics — that the room tablet caches locally and plays with live microphone scoring. The same backend runs rooms, orders, payments, battles, and chat in realtime, so the POS terminal drives every room and the admin dashboard sees the whole business.
Capabilities
What KY Karaoke does
Every capability below ships in the product today — nothing on a roadmap slide.
Software karaoke engine
Plays the cached instrumental and scores the live mic against the song's pitch data with a climbing SMART SCORE ribbon. A jukebox mode plays the original video with a reservation queue.
ML media pipeline
Two-pass vocal separation, pitch extraction, and lyrics transcription with word timings — six artifacts per song, produced by the backend and stored in object storage.
Local song cache
Every ready song is synced to the tablet's disk and played locally, never streamed — with atomic downloads, low-disk pause, and a priority lane for battles.
Battles & challenges
1v1 matches and 1-vs-many competitions with cross-room video, score broadcast every 300 ms, prize orders, and battle chat.
Room time as a product
Extending a session is an ordinary order: time products grant minutes, reschedule expiry, and update every terminal instantly.
POS payments & printing
Full, partial, and split payments — cash, card, QR — via an integrated card terminal, with ESC/POS receipt printing that renders Korean product names correctly.
Realtime everywhere
One backend emits socket events for assignments, orders, time extensions, battles, and chat, so every POS and tablet stays in sync.
Venue safety controls
Store-wide fire-alarm broadcast with a two-stage, non-dismissable dialog on every room tablet, cleared only by a server-verified staff PIN.
The platform
Four applications, one backend
Each surface is built for the person using it — the guest, the staff member, the admin — and all of them are clients of the same realtime hub.
Room tablet app
Customer-facing kiosk: song search, playback, live scoring, food and drink ordering, battles, and chat. Auto-updates itself.
Staff POS terminal
Visual room layout editor, occupancy, orders and payments, receipt printing, battles, chat controls, and business open/close settlement.
Admin backoffice
Companies, stores, branches, POS terminals, roles, products, song catalogue and curations, banners, analytics, and receipt PDFs.
Realtime backend
The API, socket hub, and media-ingest worker: rooms, sessions, orders, invoices, coupons, taxes, reports, battles, chat, and tenancy.
Inside the product
KY Karaoke in use
The main surfaces of the product — what operators and end users actually work in.
How it works
From setup to daily use
The path from first day to routine operation with KY Karaoke.
- 01
Admins load the catalogue
A CSV upload queues each song for the media pipeline; progress banners track download and processing, with cancel and retry.
- 02
The pipeline prepares each song
Vocal separation, pitch extraction, and lyrics with word timings produce six artifacts, and the song is marked ready.
- 03
Tablets sync and play locally
Room tablets cache every ready song to disk and play from there — no streaming, no buffering mid-song.
- 04
Staff run the venue from the POS
Assign rooms, take orders, extend time, process payments, start battles — every action reaches the rooms in realtime.
Under the hood
- NestJS
- Socket.IO
- MongoDB
- Redis
- S3-compatible storage
- Python ML (vocal separation, pitch, ASR)
- Electron
- React
- Next.js
- AudioWorklet DSP
- WebRTC
Who it's for
Where KY Karaoke fits
Built for
- Karaoke venue operators and chains
- Entertainment businesses with private rooms
- Operators in Korea and Cambodia (current markets)
Private-room karaoke venues
The core scenario: touchscreen rooms, live scoring, ordering from the room, staff control from the counter.
Competitions & events
Store-wide challenges with prize orders and 1-vs-many competitions with live cross-room video.
Multi-store operators
Companies, stores, zones, and roles managed centrally, with catalogue curations per tenant.
Answers
KY Karaoke: common questions
Does it need special karaoke hardware in each room?
No. Playback, lyrics, and live mic scoring are software. Each room runs a tablet application that plays machine-learning-generated media artifacts cached on its own disk.
How does a new song get into the system?
Admins upload a CSV in the backoffice. The backend's media-ingest pipeline downloads the source, runs vocal separation, pitch extraction, and lyrics transcription, uploads six artifacts to object storage, and marks the song ready — only ready songs are ever served to the room tablets.
How do staff control the rooms?
From the POS terminal. Room assignment, cleaning, session expiry, remote logout, app restart, orders, time extensions, battles, chat blocking, and the fire-alarm broadcast all flow from the POS to the rooms through the realtime backend.
Where is it deployed today?
The platform targets Korea and Cambodia. A Cambodia production environment runs with automated release trains that build and auto-update the tablet and POS applications.
Built with
The services behind this product
The same engineering we sell to clients is what these products are made of.
See KY Karaoke for your business
Book a walkthrough with the team that built it — we'll map it to your workflow and show what it looks like on your data.