Google Assistant allows you to find music by humming the melody

Just hum a few notes to Google Assistant to find the song.

Who has never had music in their heads without being able to put a name on it? And who, out of desperation, hasn’t tried to identify it by typing keywords or “nanan nanana” into a search engine? Google seems to have heard the prayers of suffering music lovers and is providing the solution via its virtual assistant. The Mountain View firm has just announced the arrival within Google Assistant of a music identification feature based on hum, whistles and approximate songs.

It is not strictly speaking a revolution in itself. Other applications such as SoundHound already offered to find a song for you based on a sung melody. But the arrival of such a tool within Google Assistant will certainly popularize the functionality.

To take advantage of it, all you have to do is launch Google’s virtual assistant and tell it “what is this song” so that it goes into listening mode. After which, you can hum, whistle or even sing a song for ten seconds. Google Assistant will then take care of finding matches on the basis of this extract. You can then listen to the different songs offered to make sure it is the song you were looking for.

How it works ? Google Assistant relies on song fingerprints – devoid of instruments and vocals – to find matches through machine learning and algorithms. The virtual assistant transforms the user’s hums into a digital sequence in order to compare it to the fingerprints of existing songs.

The tool works just as well when whistling, humming or singing approximately the lyrics of a song. The new feature is available in 20 languages ​​on Android – including French – and only in English on iOS, for now.