Adam Birney / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google lets you search for songs using audio input in the company’s Android app.
- Right now, there’s no sort of history accessible for past song searches.
- Google appears to be working on a search log similar to that available in Now Playing.
Certain problems just don’t exist anymore when you’ve got a good smartphone. Don’t know how to get somewhere? Doesn’t matter — Google Maps will figure it out. Got a song stuck in your head but can’t figure out what it is? Also not a problem — Google’s got a powerful song search tool baked right in to its Android app. While that already works quite well, we’ve spotted some under-the-hood development work that suggests it could be about to get even better.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
So far, the sound search experience within the Google app (the one that shows you that cool-looking pulsing rainbow sphere) is a largely ephemeral one: It listens for your input, analyzes that audio, and presents you with a ranked list of likely candidates. But that’s all there is to it — use it again and you’re starting fresh, seemingly without memory of past searches.
Looking into changes with the new 16.5.33.sa.arm64 beta build of the Google app, however, we’ve been able to uncover what appears to be work towards changing this behavior, and finally giving the song search tool some kind of history. Already, we’ve identified several seemingly relevant text strings:
Right now, work on the actual interface that might show this search history seems to only be in its infancy. While we’re sometimes able to activate in-development features early to get a preview, in this case all we’ve been able to coax out of the app is a screen with the correct heading, but lacking basically anything else.
You’ll notice that little history icon in the top-right of the search screen, and tapping that brings you through to that Recent song searches view. But for now, that’s as far as this is letting us go.
This is largely just speculation at the moment, but we would not be at all surprised if we end up getting an interface that largely resembles the one Google already uses for its functionally-very-similar Now Playing history. At the very least, based on those strings we can expect basic song info, probably some album art, and a timestamp for our search.
Considering how bare bones this feels at the moment, there’s a fair chance we’ll spot some further progress on this tool before it finally goes live. Keep checking in with Android Authority for updates on this and everything else Google is working on.
