How many times have you been sitting around with friends and family, or just by yourself, and song you know pops into your head for absolutely no good reason? Obviously, you've heard it before, probably several times, and maybe you even like it, but you have no idea what it's called. Thanks to a newly released feature on the Google Search app, if you can hum a few seconds of it, Google can give you the answer, or at the very least get you in the ballpark.

I have the Shazam app on my phone, and have used it several times when I hear a song I'm not familiar with at store or a restaurant. While that is handy, the song has to be playing somewhere loud enough for your phone's microphone to pick it up. With Google's new feature, you are the song maker.

In post on the Google blog Friday, Senior Product Manager of Google Search, Krishna Kumar, announced the company added a new feature to a recent update of the app that allows you to hum the melody, or sing the few words you do know, into your mobile device, and it will give you a list of possibilities of what song you're looking for. Using an algorithm based on the company's next generation music recognition program, the program turns the melody, "into a number-based sequence" and searches its vast database to find songs that match that sequence. Each result features a match percentage to help you better figure out what song is on the brink of driving you insane. The higher the percentage, the better the chances are that song is the one you're thinking of.

To try it, make sure you have the most recent version of the Google app. If not, update it. Then open it up, tap the microphone on the right hand side of the search bar, ask, "What's this song?" then start humming the part you know for a few seconds. After thinking for a few seconds, the app should show you a list of possible matches.

I say, "should" because I tried it, and couldn't get it to work. I didn't have the app on my phone, so I had to download it first which automatically gives me the latest version. I asked the question, then hummed the first few seconds of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" from The Charlie Daniels Band. Instead of a list of possible matches, it gave me a list of search results to the phrase, "what's this song."

Kumar says the feature is also available on the Google Assistant smart speaker and through the new Google widgets that were introduced in Apple's recent iOS 14 update. It does not work on the Google Chrome app. I know, because I tried it.

It's a cool concept, and one I think you'll like. Hopefully you'll have better luck than I did.

[Source: blog.google]

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