Shazam has always been the go-to app for music identification out in the wild, but Google is looking to strong arm its way into the ID game with an improved sound search function tied to Google Assistant.
This weekend Google integrated its Sound Search function into Now Playing, a music recognition feature. This has enabled quicker and more accurate recognition of songs.
To use the service, start a voice query. If there’s music playing near you, the app or device will ask, “What’s this song?” Clicking on a pop-up will start the identification process. You can also ask, “Hey Google, what’s this song?”
“We still think there’s room for improvement though — we don’t always match when music is very quiet or in very noisy environments, and we believe we can make the system even faster,” Google wrote in a blog post. “We are continuing to work on these challenges with the goal of providing the next generation in music recognition.”
The service is available on any Pixel or Android-based phone.