Adam Birney / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google offers several options for song ID on Android, but some currently require you to tell Google to listen for music.
- An in-progress change to the Google app would upgrade microphone input to automatically recognize songs.
- While it’s currently possible to preview this operation, the interface still requires a manual tap to complete.
You know what music sounds likes, don’t you? We may not always be able to recognize the exact song we’re hearing, or even name the artist, but at least we tend to know the difference between a song of some kind, and noise that isn’t a song at all. So why is it, in a world with powerful AI agents at our fingertips, sometimes we still need to manually tell Google that a song’s playing? Based on a new discovery, though, that may not be the case for much longer.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Right now, Google gives us a few different ways to identify songs that are playing. Circle to Search can easily name songs playing from other apps on your phone, and Pixel devices have the powerful Now Playing tool, which automatically IDs songs. But not every solution Google has built for naming songs is created the same. When you tap the microphone icon in the Google Android app, or in the Google widget on your home screen, Google starts listening for spoken input, but you still have to hit the “Search a song” button at the bottom of the screen to get it to identify music.
Looking through the new version 16.12.39.sa.arm64 build of the Google app, we’ve spotted work towards removing that extra step, and automatically detecting music. We’ve even been able to activate it, and you can see how “Search a song” automatically changes to “Searching song…” once music is recognized (you can’t hear it in this screen recording, but we’re playing music from a second phone).
That said, this still feels like a work in progress, because even after it’s clear that Google has detected a song, and that message changes, we still need to tap the button to see our results, sort of defeating the whole point of this upgrade. It also seems a little odd that we don’t get the colorful pulsing-sphere visual element here that Google often uses for song search.
Of course, we’re not supposed to be playing with this at all just yet, so we arguably shouldn’t be surprised at all that the feature isn’t entirely working to our expectations. And while this incomplete status leaves us a bit unsure as to when Google might be ready to roll this out, it’s frankly one change that’s a bit overdue.
