Google first took on Shazam’s core functionality of identifying songs in your area when it launched Now Playing song recognition on the Pixel 2 last year. It was rather limited, though, not only with what devices it was available on but because it used an on-device database. This means the number of songs it was able to identify is limited.
Now, Google is making this available to more users and devices by bringing the technology to the cloud through Sound Search. This now works through Google Assistant, Google Search app, or any other Android phone. You can start it up by simply asking “Hey Google, what’s this song?” Or you can launch a voice query when there’s music playing near you, the prompt “What’s this song?” will pop up and then you can tap on that for the system to start identifying the songs.
This technology gives each piece of audio a unique “fingerprint” that it uses to compare against a database. And now that this process is happening server side, it can be faster and match with more songs (like tens of millions of songs) since the technology is no longer restricted by storage or processing capacity. It can also identify if a song is popular or more obscure much better than it did before.
It has its limitations, though. Google has acknowledged that the system still has a hard time identifying music if it’s in a “very quiet” or “very noisy” environments. The company promises it’s working on the system though “with the goal of providing the next generation in music recognition.”