YouTube Music fully rolls out new ‘hum to search’ feature – and starts testing new AI-powered radio
You hum it, YouTube Music will find it
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Back in March we reported thatYouTube Music was testing a sound search featurethat would let you to find music by humming, singing or playing it. It made its way to some users in May beforeGoogleappeared to roll it back – well, now it’s finally rolling out for everybody on iOS and Android.
The feature’s accuracy will of course depend on how well you can sing or hum it; while ‘sound search’ is clever, it isn’t so smart that it can recognize a version that’s not even in the same zip code as the original.
But if the sound recognition can find a match it does so very quickly and will present you with key information including the song name and artist, the year and the download status.
How to use sound search – and what’s coming next
To activate sound search, simply tap the magnifying glass in the top right corner of theYouTubeMusic app. This reveals a sound wave icon, and if you tap on that you’ll get the full screen search page. Now all you need to do is belt out the banger and hope YouTube Music can work out what it is.
That’s not the only new feature coming to YouTube Music. According to9to5google, the service is now officially testing its AI-generated radio feature for US premium subscribers.
The rollout was spotted earlier this monthfor a very select few, but it now appears to be rolling out more widely to paying subscribers. The feature works by taking text or voice prompts and then creating a customized, personalized selection of music from them.
As we noted at the time, the new feature could be a useful tool in the battle of thebest music streaming services: because all the services have much the same catalog and charge much the same for their premium products, the music streamers are increasingly differentiating themselves on the basis of features.
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If you find yourself using a feature like Google’s AI radio stations, that’ll make YouTube’s music offering much more sticky – and our recentYouTube Music reviewalso concluded that the service is particularly good for “listeners who want to leave mainstream music behind and embrace the obscure artist”.
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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.
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