Two new strategies are being introduced by YouTube Music to improve music discovery on the platform. YouTube revealed on Monday that it’s testing a conversational radio feature created by AI and launching a new tool similar to Shazam that allows users to find the name of a song by singing, humming, or playing snippets of it.
Select Premium customers in the US are starting to receive YouTube Music’s new AI-generated conversational radio feature. When using the tool, users can designate their preferred music on a custom radio station. You may request “upbeat pop anthems” or “catchy pop choruses,” for example.
The experimental feature’s release is hardly shocking, as 9to5Google revealed last week that YouTube Music had started testing it.
The new feature on YouTube Music is a little bit like the AI playlist creation tools that Spotify, Amazon Music, and Deezer are now testing as of this Monday. To provide a customized listening experience, all four music streaming services are launching features that allow users to input textual prompts.
A new “Ask for music any way you like” card will appear in the app’s home feed for users who are able to access the new functionality. Once you click on the card, the app will open up a conversational UI where you may create a custom prompt or select a suggested one.
Although just a small number of users can currently access the service, YouTube promises to expand its user base in the future.
Users of YouTube Music may now search the song archive of the app by sound thanks to a new function called song recognition. Now, when you hit the “search” button in the app, a waveform icon will appear to let you know that you can locate the song’s name by playing, humming, or singing along.
Shazam is undoubtedly the most well-known song recognition app, but YouTube Music’s latest feature goes one better because it lets you identify a song’s name simply by humming or singing along to it, whereas Shazam can only be used when the music is being played.
The song identification feature for YouTube Music, which was initially made available to a small number of Android users earlier this year, is now formally being made available to all iOS and Android users.