Google has made substantial improvements to Google Assistant in the context of identifying music. The size of the neural network for identifying songs was quadrupled. And as a result, Google Assistant can now recognize tens of millions of songs.
In a blog post, Google said that it introduced a new version of Sound Search that is powered by the same technology as the Now Playing music recognition feature.
This makes it easier and faster to accurately identify songs. And the new Sound Search feature works on the Google Search app, Google Assistant, or any Android phone.
Now Playing first arrived on the Pixel 2 last year. Now Playing uses deep neural networks for bringing low-power and always-on music recognition to mobile devices. And the goal was to require a small fingerprint for each track in the database for it to even work without an Internet connection.
“As it turns out, Now Playing was not only useful for an on-device music recognizer, but also greatly exceeded the accuracy and efficiency of our then-current server-side system, Sound Search, which was built before the widespread use of deep neural networks. Naturally, we wondered if we could bring the same technology that powers Now Playing to the server-side Sound Search, with the goal of making Google’s music recognition capabilities the best in the world,” said Google AI’s James Lyon.
This feature can be activated a voice query and by saying “Hey Google, what’s this song?” Then click on a pop-up that initiates the song activation process.
