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How Google's Pixel 2 'Now Playing' Song Identification Works (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from VentureBeat, written by Emil Protalinski: The most interesting Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL feature, to me, is Now Playing. If you've ever used Shazam or SoundHound, you probably understand the basics: The app uses your device's microphone to capture an audio sample and creates an acoustic fingerprint to compare against a central song database. If a match is found, information such as the song title and artist are sent back to the user. Now Playing achieves this with two important differentiators. First, Now Playing detects songs automatically without you explicitly asking -- the feature works when your phone is locked and the information is displayed on the Pixel 2's lock screen (you'll eventually be able to ask Google Assistant what's currently playing, but not yet). Secondly, it's an on-device and local feature: Now Playing functions completely offline (we tested this, and indeed it works with mobile data and Wi-Fi turned off). No audio is ever sent to Google.
How in the actual fuck is this possible? They have an audio an audio signature of every song built in?
So it knows every song played in the gym, why can't it be used to _tune out_ that song playing right now with my noise-supressing headphones, since it knows every tone in advance and hasn't to guess?
Then I could hear _my_ music playing in my headphones.
Would also be great for the barmen in nightclubs and other places playing loud music.
Yet another lump of unremovable pre-installed stuff taking precious space on your phone.
If you don't turn it on, it doesn't ever download the fingerprint database.
Who really cares about how this is done. I'm much more interested in what the battery impact of such a useless feature is. Seriously, how often do most people use this feature, such that it would be useful having this run 24/7/365?
Just don't turn it on if you care that much. It isn't on by default.
Aren't these things meant to have high numbers of songs so that you can find out what that obscure song is, not just the latest taylor swift one?
Uh... no. The point is to ID that song that your friends were listening to and you are hearing it again and you want to know what to call it so you can impress your friends next time it comes on, or better still, sell you a $0.99 copy to download to your phone.
Obscure songs are... obscure. Use the online database if you want to ID obscure stuff.
No audio is ever sent to Google.
No. But the playlist along with location data probably is. Either in real time or forwarded when the network becomes available.
And then this is turned over to ASCAP/BMI to verify that commercial establishments you were in have paid their fees.
Have gnu, will travel.
According to the article the local song database is updated once per week based on the changing popularity of songs on Google Play. The least popular songs are replaced rather than expanding the database in perpetuity, and if you never enable the feature the database is never downloaded.
Google, Samsung, Apple... all their phones can now do pretty much everything their customers need, and are powerful enough where there’s not much practical gain in upgrading. These companies are basically stuck trying to sell us high priced gadgets which in truth are pretty much commodities now.
This new feature from Google doesn’t seem useful to me at all. But, given the choice between a phone able to do this and a phone which can turn me into an animated, talking poop emoji... I’d take this, thank you very much.
#DeleteChrome
What a shame that MP3s are so huge and complex that Google has a storage and indexing capacity problem
What a shame that you didn't RTFA and missed the part where they explain that it works while the device is not connected to internet
lucm, indeed.
"This is on my phone why?
"
Because you installed it by mistake and are too silly to remove it?
Because you needed something to complain about?
Can you tell us? Why did you put it on your phone?