YouTube Music rolls out new 'hum to search' feature for Android users
With the new AI feature, you will be able to find songs by humming or singing without knowing the lyrics.
Remember how Shazam helps you identify a song that you remember the tune to but not the title? Well, YouTube Music for Android has decided to offer some competition by releasing a new song identification feature that does the same thing.
With the new AI feature, you will be able to find songs by humming or singing without knowing the lyrics. All you need to do is hum or sing a part of the music you know, and YouTube will bring up the closest song from its database that matches what you hummed.
To use this feature, you will have to look for a waveform icon next to the microphone icon in the search button of your YouTube Music app on your Android device.
Once you tap on the waveform icon, YouTube Music begins listening through your microphone and then scours its database for a match to your humming and reports back with what it thought you were singing.
Loy Okezie
Interestingly, The Verge confirmed through a testing phase that YouTube Music was better than Shazam in terms of song identification accuracy, which is saying a lot considering that Shazam has been around for quite some time. To be fair though, Google introduced the 'hum to search' function on its Google Assistant as far back as 2020, having the functionality ported to the YouTube Music app likely wasn't a major challenge.
However, we believe that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we would advise that you try it out yourself to decide if indeed YouTube Music is clear.
Right now, the new feature has been spotted in the YouTube Music application for Android (with version 7.02 or higher), which means that it is only available to select users and may take some time before it becomes generally available to YouTube's over 100 million subscribers globally per company data.
