Google’s New ‘Hum to Search’ Feature Is Remarkable

Humming is all you need to know the song

Google’s New ‘Hum to Search’ Feature Is Remarkable

Photo by Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash

Hey, could you help me figure out the song stuck in my head? It goes like this-

‘na na nah nahhh nahhh na nana na nah na nah nah na nah’

I just can’t figure it out. Can you?

Well… Nevermind, listing to the tune and then identifying the song is hard enough, let alone interpreting it just with some text.

We all have been in this situation. This phenomenon is called an earworm.-,Earworms%20or%20stuck%20song%20syndrome,population%20has%20experienced%20these%20earworms.&text=Usually%2C%20stuck%20songs%20are%20catchy,or%20by%20hearing%20the%20melody.): A tune keeps bugging us, ringing in our heads until we find its name. Many people can’t get rid of it even if they know the name of the song, but for me, the name is the escape. Being Good at Google is a Skill | Data Driven Investor Being good at 'Google" is a skill. Yes, you heard me. Knowing what and how to Google or search for something is an…datadriveninvestor.com

This syndrome destroys productivity, attention, and will drive you to infinite distraction. I know you have experienced it, It’s a very common phenomenon.

A recent Finnish poll revealed that nearly 92% of people experience involuntary musical imagery at least once a week.

Google Comes to Rescue

Google recently released a feature in Google search called ‘hum to search’. When I learned about it, I thought it would be limited and would not work for most of the songs.

I was very wrong.

There are two ways to use this feature. One way is to open Google Assistant and say ‘What’s this song’ then hum the song as you would normally do when asking a friend about it — Do it for 10–15 seconds. Another way is to tap the “Search a song” button and do the same.

A pop-up will appear with a few songs, it thinks matches the hum. It will show you the results in the order from highest to lowest likelihood.

Results from ‘hum to search’Results from ‘hum to search’

I tried the feature with a lot of different songs, in both English and Hindi. It guessed all of them correctly, except just once — I guess I did not hum properly that time — I was shocked to see it working so well.

The features work in English on IOS and in over 20 languages on Android devices. Also, you need not hum in the perfect pitch or tone, it still shows reasonable results, although the match percentage may decrease.

Since the inception of convolution neural networks, AI has become exceptionally good in a small amount of time.

Hum to search’ features uses machine learning models to transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song’s melody

In 2017, Google launched ‘Now Playing’ on Pixel 2, this allowed the pixel to recognize any song playing near you; In 2018, they enhanced the same technology to work for millions of songs and remained the feature to ‘Sound Search’.

Shazam is better at detecting more songs playing in the vicinity, but humming won’t work. With ‘hum to search feature’, Google beats Shazam to dust.

Recently, GPT-3 by Open AI was released. It could code webpages using text descriptions, write articles, songs, technical manuals, and much more. Google’s music recognition technology is developing so rapidly, it scares me a bit.

Oh! one more thing, that song was Hollywood’s Bleeding by Post Malone.

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