With Pixel phones, Google takes advantage of tighter control over hardware and Android software to include some quality-of-life features like Magic Eraser, Guided Frame, and Now Playing. The latter is a handy utility that automatically identifies music playing around you, so you don’t need to summon Google Assistant for the same capability. Apps on the Play Store have since replicated this always listening feature, but Google is now improving its implementation with a new interface and collection of statistics from all the identified music.
At launch, Google’s Now Playing feature was worthy of admiration because it used on-device intelligence to identify tracks with infallible accuracy. Google since supercharged it with access to a much larger resource library with cloud search capabilities, but the interface remains rather drab, only showing you songs identified along with a timestamp, and a tab with songs you loved at first encounter. 9to5Google reports this is changing on Android 14, with a new Summary tab showing up in Now Playing history.
Source: 9to5Google
This tab contains interesting statistics from all the songs your Pixel has recognized. You can see the number of tracks identified, how many artists contributed to them, and how many genres they spanned. It also shows the top five songs and artists, so you can look up related playlists in a jiffy. Like in the current implementation, you can tap any artist or track to find streaming services with that content. You can also see the most common time of day Now Playing identifies these tracks.
Considering how popular features like YouTube Recap and Spotify Wrapped are, it won’t hurt to check this new tab in Now Playing every once in a while, even if the songs aren’t necessarily ones you chose. However, if you curate a private record collection, this feature can be a fine way to keep track of your preferences in music.
Right now, there’s no information when we will see this feature roll out widely — it could be with the Android 14 stable release or an upcoming Pixel Feature Drop later this year. Hopefully Google I/O slated for May 10 clears the air a little. If you don’t have access to Now Playing on a Pixel phone, Google offers other ways to identify songs, and they are quite easy to summon and get rid of that track living rent-free in your head.
Thanks: Kieron
