Hum a song to your Xiaomi phone, and it’ll find the title in seconds

By Maria Mora February 16, 2016

Have a tune stuck in your head but can’t seem to remember the lyrics? One of the most common first-world problems is finally getting a solution.

Privately owned Chinese company Xiaomi is introducing a new feature to its smartphones: a software designed to recognize songs based on your humming. Xiaomi partnered up with ACRCloud, a Beijing-based company that provides the music recognition software for the phones, reports Mashable. ACRCloud’s technology is integrated with popular music streaming services, including Spotify, iTunes, and Deezer, to help identify around 40 million tracks as they’re hummed.

ACRCloud can extract the person’s melody and isolate it from any background noise, while comparing it to the songs in the database. Songs that don’t match the humming sample get discarded quickly before the software minimizes its options. This feature comes to Xiaomi phones after Apple’s decision to integrate Shazam in iOS 8 allowed users to ask Siri what song they are listening to. Though Shazam has the ability to identify which song you are hearing, it doesn’t have the capability to tell you what song you’re humming. SoundHound can, though, so Xiaomi and ACRCloud have some competition.

However, SoundHound asks its users to provide a humming sample to its database in order to identify music. ACRCloud hopes to identify songs through humming without having to use a base track.

Xiaomi is currently testing out the beta version with the help of several thousand users. Depending on how the trial period goes, the company will proceed with adding the feature to all of its current phone models by March. Mashable tested the feature and reported that it can identify what song is being hummed within 20 seconds.

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Maria Mora is a creative, media professional fusing a background of audio production with editorial writing. Technology…

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