Andy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google appears to be working on an expansion of Now Playing song-ID into a broader Audio Memory feature.
- In addition to recognizing songs both on and off your device, Audio Memory also teases the ability to track conversations.
Pixel users already know just how convenient it is to have their phones always at the ready to help name that catchy tune you just can’t place. Google just gave its song-ID tool a major upgrade with the release of Now Playing as its own dedicated app, and now we’re already checking out what could be the next phase of evolution for this powerful feature.
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We’re looking at a recent Android System Intelligence update, where we’re getting our first look at something apparently called “Audio Memory.” And while it sounds 99% like Now Playing, there’s one quick reference that hints at some much broader functionality.
Take a look at some of the text strings we’ve found connected to Audio Memory, here referenced via codename “blueflax”:
Code
"Music recognition automatically identifies music using a song database on your device. If a song isn't recognized, a short digital fingerprint may be sent to Google to securely search the cloud. Background conversations and audio are never sent to Google.
Manually identifying a song uses a cloud search to provide better recognition and album artwork. Now Playing uses privacy-preserving analytics.
You can control which apps Audio Memory can use to identify music."
Info about songs you play or hear in other apps displays in your music history
Music on your device
"Find out what's playing around you and on this device"
Continue
Keep track of what you hear throughout your day, from the music around you to your important conversations
"Find out what's playing around you"
Music recognition
What Audio Memory can do
Keep in mind
"Info about songs playing nearby displays on your device's lock screen. To get more details, tap the name of the song or tap it again to open the Now Playing app."
Music around you
No thanks
Welcome to Audio Memory
Turn on music recognition There’s that direct reference to Now Playing, but pay close attention to the onboarding message for new users: “Keep track of what you hear throughout your day, from the music around you to your important conversations.” Right now, the solutions we have are all about identifying songs, while this sounds more like an AI note-taker app.
We’ve even been able to get a couple early screens to show up — but sadly, without any more details about the conversation-tracking component of Audio Memory:
So, we’ve got the ability to identify ambient music, the ability to ID songs playing through other apps on your phone, and somewhere mixed in there, the possibility of this new tool for tracking important conversations. To say that we still have a lot of questions about how this will all work would be a bit of an understatement. The larger effort appears to be a repositioning of Google’s song-ID tech as this Audio Memory backend.
Could the fact that we’re only getting that one fleeting reference to conversation tracking be a hint that it’s more of a future goal for Google, and might not end up being an initial component of Audio Memory? At this point, it’s probably too soon to start speculating there, and right now we’re mostly just looking forward to getting a look at these changes in action. For the moment, we’ll just have to keep checking for further signs of development.
⚠️ 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.
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