By Google is trying out a cool new feature on YouTube. It lets you find a song by simply humming it or recording a snippet of it. If you’re part of this experiment, you can hum or record at least three seconds of a song, and Google will do its best to figure out which song it is. Once it does, it’ll show you stuff related to that song. Think of it as Google’s version of Shazam, the music recognition app owned by Apple.
But hold on, not everyone gets to try this out right away. Google is starting with a small group of people who watch YouTube on Android devices.
This might sound familiar to some folks. In 2020, Google first introduced this feature in its main app, the Google Search widget, and Google Assistant. It allowed people to identify songs by humming, whistling, or singing into the microphone icon. The main difference here seems to be that Google’s feature needed you to hum for 10-15 seconds to work.
Right now, this song-search thing is only available to a small bunch of Android users. If it becomes more widespread, it could be pretty handy, especially since so many people use YouTube to look up songs.
The way this works is pretty cool. Google uses fancy machine learning tech to match your hum or recording to the unique melody of a song, like its musical fingerprint. The YouTube test uses the same tech as Google’s, but it seems to work a bit faster, finding the song in less time.
So, if you’re on Android and part of the lucky group, you can now find songs on YouTube by humming or recording them. It’s a nifty feature that makes searching for songs a breeze.
