Google has unveiled a new feature to help you find a song by humming or singing to your phone. The best part? You don’t even need great pitch.
The team at Google have become the first tech company to provide an answer to a question we’ve all had before: “Do you know that song that goes, ‘da daaaa da da daaaa na naa naa ooohh yeah’? Or the one that starts with the guitar chords going, ‘da na na naa’?”
The new feature on the latest version of the Google app and Google Search widget on your browser will allow you to tap the mic icon and ask “What’s this song?” or click on “Search a song”. Then all you’ve got to do is hum, sing, or whistle your best impression of the song in your head for 10-15 seconds.
Krishna Kumar, senior product manager for Google Search, explained the new feature in a blog post:
“When you hum a melody into Search, our machine learning models transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody… We’ll show you the most likely options based on the tune.”
“Then you can select the best match and explore information on the song and artist, view any accompanying music videos or listen to the song on your favorite music app, find the lyrics, read analysis and even check out other recordings of the song when available”.
We truely are living in the matrix, friends.
This feature is currently available in English on iOS and in more than 20 languages on Android, which will be expanded to more languages in the future. Admittedly it isn’t great for those of us who haven’t got the best pitch, but at least if English isn’t your best language you’ll happily be able to use Hum to Search.
The exponential rise in Artificial Intelligence might be damn scary, but let’s not forget it was Google who helped us find our favourite songs to soundtrack the end of the world and the enslavement of the human race.
People search what song is playing over 100 million times in search every month, so Google added hum to search. #search2020
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 15, 2020
