Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is testing a hum-to-search feature for YouTube, allowing you to find songs by humming.
- You can also record a song with your phone’s microphone to search for it.
- The platform is also testing a so-called “shelf” feature to bundle multiple recent uploads from a creator in one place.
Humming to find a song isn’t anything new in the smartphone space, as Google Assistant and Soundhound have offered this feature for a while now. It’s nevertheless a handy way to find a song on your phone when you don’t know anything else about the track.
Now, Google has announced that it’s offering this hum-to-search functionality on YouTube as part of an experiment, along with the ability to record a currently playing song to identify it.
Google says you need to toggle from YouTube Voice Search to the song search feature to get started. You’ll then need to hum or record the song for at least three seconds, with the feature then sending you to the relevant content on YouTube (e.g. an official music video, a user-uploaded video, or a Shorts clip).
The hum-to-search and recording features are only available to a “small percentage” of YouTube viewers on Android right now. So don’t be surprised if you don’t have access to it just yet. It’s also worth noting that Google is labeling this a test or experiment, suggesting that these features might undergo major changes before being available for everyone. In saying so, we do hope the search giant brings this feature to YouTube Music as well.
This isn’t the only YouTube feature in testing right now, as Google also announced that it’s testing a “channel shelf” in the Subscriptions feed. This will effectively combine multiple recent uploads from a creator into a “shelf.” So you won’t necessarily need to directly visit their channel to view their recent uploads. In addition to the sheer convenience of it all in theory, Google says the feature is also supposed to “put less pressure on creators to upload multiple times a day.”
Much like the hum-to-search functionality for songs, Google confirmed that this feature is only being tested with a “small percentage” of users to start with.
