A long-awaited feature is coming (again) to YouTube Music, and it’s likely (hence the “summary” in the title) that you’re reading this news saying you’ve already experienced it. And indeed, we gave you this news back at the end of May, but for reasons unknown to us, Google decided to reverse the rollout of this feature. So since then, there are many of us who have been waiting for his deployment to resume, which is finally happening.

I am of course talking about music identification function, although its name in English is a more general reference, classifies it as “voice search”. However, don’t be fooled by its name that it is actually capable of identifying any type of sound, as when using it, it is very clear from the above text that it is limited to music identification only. The text in question is «Play, sing or hum a song«.

As we mentioned at the time, we should not compare YouTube Music’s music identification function with the most respected service in this sense, Shazam, but rather with others such as the less popular but more versatile SoundHound. Because? Because Shazam is only able to recognize reproductions of the original song, while SoundHound and YouTube Music, among others, are also able to identify the songs we sing and hum.

As we read on 9to5Google, YouTube Music ID rollout is coming to both Android and iOS, although it seems to be done gradually, as it is necessary to have the latest version of the application and to have the feature enabled for each user and on each platform. And this is something I can personally attest to, as I have updated the app on both my iPhone and Google Pixel, but at the moment the ID is only available on the latter.

Its operation is very simple. Once the app is open, just click on the magnifying glass icon displayed in the top left corner and if you already have this feature enabled, a new control will appear at the top to the right of the microphone, representing a sound wave. And when you click it, YouTube Music starts listening to what’s playing around you (or the song you’re playing vocally) to offer you the result in seconds.

Having verified that the feature is already available, before writing this report I did some tests with it, also focusing on the most complex identifications, i.e. voice reproduction (singing and humming), and I admit that it surprised. for goodness sake she was able to interpret ten songs of different genres that I tested her with. So with this feature, YouTube Music gains a notable point compared to the rest of the streaming music services it competes with.