Finally, you can use Gemini on Android for audio song identification

The transition from Google Assistant to Gemini, while exciting in many ways, has come with a few frustrating growing pains. As Gemini gets smarter with complex tasks, we’ve sometimes lost the simple, everyday features we relied on with Assistant. For me, and I know for many of you, one of the biggest feature gaps has been asking Gemini to simply identify a song playing nearby.

For months, asking Gemini “what song is this?” has resulted in an unhelpful text response telling you to use a music recognition app. It was a definite step backward that forced users to change their habits to using the homescreen search widget instead, and that was just clunky. Luckily, as 9to5Google reports, this particular pain point has finally been addressed.

How it works (and the one small catch)

In a recent update to the Gemini app on Android, asking “what song is this?” will now correctly launch the Google app’s excellent “Song Search” capability. You’ll see the familiar fullscreen interface with the pulsing sphere as it listens for the music. When it finds a match, the results will open up in the Google app.

Now, here’s the small catch: it’s not a truly native or inline experience. Instead of identifying the song and showing you the result directly within the Gemini interface, it’s essentially handing off the task to the Google Search app. It’s not as elegant as the old, integrated Assistant feature was, but honestly, it’s a massive improvement over being told to go find another app.

A welcome return to voice commands

This is a fantastic quality-of-life update because it brings back the habit of using a voice commands to identify a song. No more fumbling to find a widget or shortcut when you hear a song you want to identify; you can just ask your assistant again. It’s a small change that removes a daily point of friction for anyone who has made the switch to using Gemini as their primary assistant on Android.

This change appears to have been rolling out over the past few weeks on Android. For now, it seems to be Android-only, as asking the same question on the iOS Gemini app doesn’t yet trigger the Song Search feature. While we hope to see a more deeply integrated, native version of this in the future, it’s great to see that Google has plugged this very noticeable feature gap.