Google may finally add album art to Now Playing on Pixel phones
 

• Google is finally looking to upgrade the Pixel’s Now Playing feature by adding album art to the history page.
• Since the feature was introduced, it’s been able to show you a list of songs it recognized, but that list only included the song name, artist, and time of recognition.
• A recent code change suggests that the feature will start to pull album art images curated by YouTube Music.

Google Pixel devices may not always have the absolute best hardware among Android phones, but they do offer a lot of really attractive Pixel-only features that are hard to replicate on other devices. Take “Now Playing” as an example: This Pixel exclusive was introduced with the Pixel 2 series in 2017, and it identifies songs that are playing nearby. Sure, apps like Shazam are readily available and have done music recognition for years, but Now Playing works entirely in the background without you even needing to pull out your phone.

The way Now Playing works is quite clever. Your Pixel phone downloads a database containing tens of thousands of fingerprints of the most popular songs in your region. These fingerprints are unique identifiers that allow your phone to recognize what song is playing using only a few seconds of audio. Your phone’s ultra low power co-processor is continuously analyzing audio through the microphone, and when it picks up audio that sounds like it could be music, the main processor is woken up to record a few seconds of the audio. An on-device machine learning model then matches the audio to one of the fingerprints in the Now Playing database. Finally, the name and artist of the song is displayed on the lock screen as well as in a notification.




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