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Comment by watty | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to take away from Shazam (because I too was amazed when I first used it) but the Pixel phones have Shazam-like ability built in which uses minimal battery and without internet... and it's constantly running any time music plays.

Not really "magic" how it works but still pretty amazing that I can pull the phone out of my pocket any time I hear a song I like and immediately see the band/title.

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> without internet

For anyone else finding this as implausible as I was, apparently the Pixel has a local database of 17,300 tracks. Still pretty impressive though.

https://uk.pcmag.com/news/91606/googles-pixel-2-phones-recog...

> Pixel phones have Shazam-like ability built in which uses minimal battery and without internet... and it's constantly running any time music plays.

Is it on by default? Cos that sounds really creepy.

Shazam is also on by default [1] , so they are both creepy

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8ee3/shazam-kee...

The Mac app is, which I didn't even know existed.

To stress the point, this feature uses a local database, doesn't send any data off of the device, and is turned off by default.

Imo the creepy thing is that phones are now powerful enough to run always on analysis, not that they are currently doing anything malicious with it.

Coming soon, Pixel will be able to recognize over 1 million individual voices in your area! Using our enormous database of phone calls to your area code and individualized location tracking, you will be able to find out everything about a person simply by holding your phone near their voice!

No, it's not.

> and without internet

That's really sweet—I wonder how much storage that requires? I would have expected it to require a lot, but if it's on a phone, then maybe not that much?

The database holds fingerprints for ~17000 songs and takes 53MBs: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-2-now-playing-so...

They should allow you to download databases based on things like genre. The 64gb Pixel could hold a very very large amount

Thanks—that's crazy awesome :-)

They do? I use a Pixel 2 XL and I had no idea about this.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7535326?hl=en

Neat.

Google used to have song identification via voice search and a widget on all Android phones since Lollipop. Then they killed it for no reason other than to screw over existing users. Widget is still there in Nougat but doesn't do anything.

They recently updated the music search. It's integrated in their assistant, and they have a widget for direct access.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/09/googles-next-generation-mu...

what, the functionality is still there in Nougat, I access it mostly through the assistant which is good enough to detect a song is playing and suggest What is this song? and has great accuracy

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