Google Pixel phones previously offered a background song recognition feature backed by Android’s System Intelligence. The feature used to work in the background and identify songs that are playing nearby. Now, the company has introduced the feature with a dedicated app called Now Playing, making music identification more seamless and accessible for users.

What makes the app more intuitive is that it is reportedly faster at recognising songs, and it can even work without an internet connection since the processing happens directly on the device. Know in detail how the Now Playing app redefines song discovery.

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Now Playing app: How does it work?

The Now Playing app works similarly to the background song recognition feature on the Pixel phones. As mentioned above, the app on Google Pixel phones can identify songs playing nearby even without internet access. The entire song recognition process happens directly on the phone, and it does not send audio to cloud servers. 

Since processing happens locally, the song identification gets faster and more seamless. You can identify even the smallest song clip, and it will instantly look for results. It automatically listens for music nearby and sometimes already shows the song name on the lock screen before the user even unlocks the phone.

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Google’s Now Playing app integrates with Spotify, hence it can directly open the recognised song when users click on the “Listen on Spotify” button. Hence, it reduces the time and manual search efforts. It also enables you to save songs to the Liked Songs playlist, explore the artist, or add the song albums to your playlists.

The app also comes with a History feature that lets you browse old song recognitions, organise or manage the list, and reopen tracks you liked, or save to favourites. The Now Playing app is quite similar to Shazam, but since it works on-device, it offers greater flexibility.