Did you guess what song I was humming there? Because it was obviously All Star by Smash Mouth. Today's tech-letter will be short, since it covers a tech-tool only released very recently. But boy have I had fun with it.

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I am 80% sure that at least some of you have Googled a 'hum' before. Or at least seen someone else do it. 

It's all fun and games until you realise that this is the most serious pandemic we're facing. Trying to remember a song so desperately but being unable to find it (P.S. that was a joke. Please wear a mask).

Many have tried and failed to address this (notable mentions include: Shazam, SoundHound), so the big-dogs had to pull out the big-guns (P.S. This is not an actual phrase, since it clearly doesn't make any sense).

A month ago (almost exactly), Google announced their new Hum feature-- there's a great marketing video they made, if you want to watch that. 

Using the latest version of the Google app, Google now lets you search for a song by humming for 10-15 seconds. You can use this on your iOS or Android devices by clicking on the microphone and selecting the "Search a song" button.

I can assure you, this most definitely worked for me. You don't even have to be a good singer (which is true for most of us, surely). 

Google uses machine learning to identify potential song matches, and gives a % rating for the likelihood of each song being the one you hummed; i.e. after humming for 10-15 seconds, Google presents a short list (3) of potential songs it could be, and rates each ones potential match.

If you're curious to know how this works, Google explains that their machine learning models interpret your humming using certain characteristics that are then compared to thousands of songs. 

They essentially dived deeper into something that you're already used to, which is identification of songs (what you see when you use Shazam).

Google's hum feature is free to use, you just need the Google app or Google search widget. For iOS users, this is only available in English for now; Android users can take advantage of over 20 languages.

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