Google loves to one-up the competition, being the behemoth it is. Just last week we wrote that a new feature was coming to music streaming service Spotify that allows users to search for music by typing in song lyrics. It’s a really neat update, one that’s been around on other music apps for some time now, but since most of us at Stuff use Spotify it was a pretty cool feature for us. Google went and made something even better, as the search engine can now figure out the song you’re looking for based entirely on… humming?
‘Hey Google, who are the Crash Test Dummies?’
That’s right, you can now hum a song at Google and not only will it understand what song you’re looking for, it’ll take you directly to it like the eager-to-please search engine it is. It’s as if an engineer at Google stumbled upon the Tip of my Tongue reddit, a forum where users can post an unknown song, often only using “lala’s” as the identifier and people can comment on what it is. It’s actually a remarkably wise subreddit, and incredibly useful too.
Well, the forum just became a whole lot less useful now that the humming feature has been implemented in Google. To use it, all you need to do is open the Google App or Search Widget, tap the little microphone in the search bar and say, “What’s this song?” followed by a hum of whatever tune is eluding you. You’ll need at least 10 seconds of humming time to get the song but if you can’t at least do that then you don’t deserve to know what the song is.
It might be a really small tool but it’s actually just amazing that Google’s AI is able to take something like the sound of someone humming and figure out what song the user is looking for. That’s genuinely remarkable and little scary. Just try not to think about it as you never have to worry about having an earworm stuck in your head ever again.
(Source: TNW)