"And this year’s Pixel will take advantage of the phone’s always-on microphones to listen for music (not just the phrase “OK Google”) and display what you’re listening to on the screen, even if it’s something on the radio."
Pretty sure it can't do that without at least transmitting audio fingerprints to the cloud passively...
Idea: a device that sniffs wifi and bluetooth MAC addresses and warns you when there's a Google Pixel2 in earshot...
(Note: That's the Pixel2, not the earbuds, but for the "magic" to work, the earbud wearers will have one of those in their pockets...)
Really? I'd love to know how they do that? Can you _really_ cram a useable sized db of popular music fingerprints into something small enough to store locally on a phone these days?
I work for google but have no clue what underlying tech is being used here. But I have some familiarity with audio fingerprinting, so I thought I'd comment.
Using a not particularly efficient but reliable fingerprinting algorithm such as http://www.ismir2002.ismir.net/proceedings/02-FP04-2.pdf, you need 2.6kbits/sec for the fingerprint. Popular songs tend to be short, so lets say 3:30 per song on average. That works out to about 70K per song, or 70MB per 1000 songs. But compression and/or other sorts of encoding cleverness could massively reduce this number. Bottom line is that it wouldn't be hard to store thousands of fingerprints given a few hundred megabytes of storage (out of 64GB or more).
You don't need then entire song for a fingerprint, and the MusicBrainz (MetaBrainz) project has long been supported by Google.
I couldn't find anything which said how big their db is, but you could do some artist/song popularity smarts to figure out the tracks a user is most likely to listen to.
But to constantly be searching through fingerprints for every sound? I'd be interested to see what Googles solution to this may be.
I mean, would that satisfy a majority of needs, even? When I use Shazam, it's usually to identify a weird instrumental or otherwise obscure song that I've never heard before.
If you do the explicit ask for what song is playing then it starts recording and sends it to the cloud just like Shazam. Presumably that recognizes far more than just 10k most popular songs.
This is just passive recognition which can have much less coverage since you aren't relying on it.
I'm a bit late, but I watched the announcement for this feature and they explicitly said that nothing was sent to that cloud to determine what song it was.
I remember this stood out to me, because that was a large concern of mine when I first heard about the feature. I respected that they went out of their way to make this point.
She said that it is based on machine learning, and something like a database of "audio samples". it uses the samples to figure it out, I guess.
> the earbud wearers will have one of those in their pockets
Use a recording app start recording the mic on your phone, put it in your pocket, and then talk at normal conversation volumes. It's not gonna pick up much, to say nothing of a person on the other side of the room.
From: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/4/16408962/n...
"And this year’s Pixel will take advantage of the phone’s always-on microphones to listen for music (not just the phrase “OK Google”) and display what you’re listening to on the screen, even if it’s something on the radio."
Pretty sure it can't do that without at least transmitting audio fingerprints to the cloud passively...
Idea: a device that sniffs wifi and bluetooth MAC addresses and warns you when there's a Google Pixel2 in earshot...
(Note: That's the Pixel2, not the earbuds, but for the "magic" to work, the earbud wearers will have one of those in their pockets...)