YouTube, the video-sharing platform under Google’s ownership, has unveiled a new feature currently in testing for Android devices, enabling users to search for songs by simply humming the tune.
This development appears to be an evolution of Apple’s Shazam app, which permits users to identify songs, ads, or TV shows by playing a brief snippet of audio to their device’s microphone.
According to YouTube, the song search functionality will accept both humming and, similar to Shazam, recording a section of the currently playing song. This experimental feature will be accessible to a limited percentage of Android users worldwide.
The company explained in a blog post, “For users participating in the experiment, it’s possible to switch from the regular YouTube voice search to this new song search feature. By humming or recording at least 3 seconds of the desired song, the system can then identify it.”
Once the song is successfully recognized, users will be guided to official music content related to the song, user-generated videos, and even Shorts that showcase the searched song within the YouTube app.
Similar apps for identifying songs through singing or humming, such as SoundHound and MusixMatch, are available for both iOS and Android platforms.
Interestingly, YouTube’s introduction of this new feature follows closely on the heels of their recent experimentation with AI-generated video summaries. These summaries are designed to provide users with a quick overview of a video’s content on watch and search pages.
It’s important to note that these AI-generated summaries are not intended to replace the descriptive text provided by video creators.
