Google-owned video-sharing platform YouTube has announced it is testing a feature on Android devices that lets users search for a song by humming it.
This seems like an advancement of Apple’s Shazam app that allows users to look up a song, advert or TV show by playing a short sample of it to their device’s microphone.
YouTube said the search-by-song feature will support humming and – like Shazam – recording a song that is currently being played. The experiment will be available for a small percentage of Android users across the globe.
“If you’re in the experiment, you can toggle from YouTube voice search to the new song search feature, and hum or record the song you’re searching for 3+ seconds in order for the song to be identified,” the company said in a blog post.
Once the song is identified, a user will be directed to relevant official music content, user-generated videos, as well as Shorts featuring the searched song in the YouTube app.
Other music recognition apps that support song identification through singing or humming are SoundHound and MusixMatch, both of which are available for iOS and Android.
YouTube’s new feature comes just weeks after the company began testing artificial intelligence (AI) auto-generated summaries for videos.
The summaries are set to make it easier for users to read a quick summary of what a video is about on watch and search pages.
YouTube said they will, however, not replace video descriptions that are written by creators.