YouTube May Soon Let You Hum Tunes to Find Songs, Feature Test Begins: All Details

YouTube is getting ready to raise the competition level with Apple’s Shazam in letting users find songs they heard somewhere, liked them, but forgot to add them to their playlists. Every music enthusiast’s dream of just humming half-remembered tunes to find the exact song might come true with a new feature, that YouTube is currently testing. Select Android users are getting to test this search-by-song capability before YouTube rolls it out to more users.

The Google-owned video sharing app YouTube may let users hum and even record the tunes in order to find those earworms.

“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,” a post by YouTube stated on August 23.

Back in 2020, Google had launched a similar capability on its Google Search widget and Google Assistant. At the time however, people were required to hum the tune for around fifteen seconds, a TechCrunch report said.

Both Google and YouTube are leveraging the power of Machine Learning (ML) to make this feature work. On YouTube, once the song is be identified it would redirect the users to relevant official music content, user- generated videos, and/or Shorts featuring the searched song.

Similar music recognition features are available on third party apps like SoundHound and MusixMatch, but this feature coming to YouTube could be used by its estimated massive global userbase of 2.7 billion.

YouTube testing newer features to finetune its app for its user and creator communities is nothing new. Presently, the platform is bringing a couple of design tweaks to its ‘Skip Ads’ button while also rolling out rounded corners for the video player.

The video platform is also testing a channel shelf in the Subscriptions feed for multiple YouTube uploads, Q&A stickers for Shorts on mobile, as well as a new ‘For You’ section on channel homepages among other features.