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Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

Siri has been able to identify music (I believe using Shazam?) for 3 - 4 years. I suspect they were shopping themselves around, and Apple wanted to own the technology enough to give them their asking price.

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The technology Google is using here is very different. They also have active detection on Assitant, but this one is a passive 24/7 detection. There's a local database of the ~10k most popular songs, and it's only ~50mb [0]. It's all done locally, and when it works (Which is very often), you just have to look down at your phone and the song name is already there on the lockscreen without you touching anything.

[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-2-now-playing-so...

What a waste of power.

You seem to presume that uses a lot of power. Which (to the best of my knowledge) is not true.

I don't know that sounds very cool, but it really just seems like a waste of power. I can't think of the last time I would want that.

As mentioned above, this is already running to do OK Google detection. It's also not scanning 100% of the audio, as far as I understand, it analyzes samples roughly each minute. I'm sure they would not make this a feature if it had a big impact. From my own experience, turning this feature on or off made no difference in battery life.

I haven't been able to determine if this is a deliberate plot or just incompetence, but Siri's language parsing for the Shazam music identification became maddeningly limited in some recent iOS update. The only phrasing I can trigger it with now is "What's this song?". "Name this song", "What song is this", etc. all give me some Marx-brothers-esque response like "Sorry, I couldn't find the song What in your library."

Oh, and the only thing you can do with the result is tap it to be bumped to Apple Music, where (if you have a subscription and the song is available), the song starts playing. Hey Apple, when in the history of ever has someone wanted to start playing the song they are already listening to? At least let me copy the damn name. Siri is a dumpster fire.

I use "What's playing?"

Google Assistant has also been able to that for ages.

The pixel does something very different : it automatically tries to identify what is playing right now and writes the name of the song on the lockscreen.

It might seem to be gimmicky but I have found myself really liking this feature.

Gracenote (the people who bought and closed CDDB) offer music identifying to anyone who wants to license it. I remember Sony Ericsson feature phones all had this feature powered by gracenote. I would assume that's what Apple is using.

Apple's music ID results have always had the Shazam logo in the corner.

The difference is that it never seems to work with Siri where as soon as I open the Shazam app it works fine.

I use Siri a lot, I’m not a Siri hater. But I don’t think this feature has ever worked when I tried it.

Interesting, this is pretty much the only thing I use Siri for and it works great in my experience.

"Siri, name that tune"

Does Siri save the result anywhere? It’s nice to get an instant response but my memory isn’t very good.

iTunes Store app

And I mean why not? Apple has over $250 billion in cash, so they might as well use it to make acquisitions like this.

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