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Continuous low-power music recognition

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Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#41

Post by awalton »

...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life. I don't think it's even worth giving away 0.25% of battery life to detect whatever the 70k songs stored in the database is, nor is it worth the space the database is taking up on the device. The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search through. In other words, it does a worse job than existing solutions and uses power constantly.

It feels more like yet another solution looking for a problem. Worse, it screams like a foot in the door for telling users it's okay for microphones around you to always be listening, ala Amazon Echo. It also weakly smells like it'll immediately be used to send packets of what songs were listened to and similar frequency info off-device to be collected by the Google Big Data machine to be sold to RIAA members, as yet another way of extracting ad dollars from Android.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#42

Post by mankyd »

awalton wrote: post #41

...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life. I don't think it's even worth giving away 0.25% of battery life to detect whatever the 70k songs stored in the database is, nor is it worth the space the database is taking up on the device. The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search throu…

> ...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life.

I view it differently. Percent of battery life isn't an interesting metric in a vacuum. It's whether you easily/regularly get the phone back to a charger without it feeling burdensome. That is to say, does the phone last all your waking hours without threatening to turn off.

I own one of these fancy new Pixel 2's. I find that the phone is usually above 30% when I'm returning to bed at night. The music detection has proved useful at times, and a single percent of battery isn't going to make me sweat.

However, in a year or two, when the battery starts losing performance, you may be right. My old phone, a 5X, often dipped close to 5% by the time I got to bed. I had to go out of my way to find a charger, which was frustrating. Sacrificing yet another bit of battery for this feature would only make that worse.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#43

Post by pavel_lishin »

itp wrote: post #32
pavel_lishin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was enabled on my phone - which I discovered at the dentist's office. Now, it's possible that I idly clicked "ok" while setting up my Pixel 2 - it's not out of the realm of possibility - but I'm not very likely to turn that on at all. Germany has much more stringent privacy regulations than the US does - maybe that's the difference.

I've just recently set up a Pixel 2 XL straight from factory a few times over the last couple weeks, all in the US. Every time I had to opt in to the background music detection feature, even in the US.

I must have toggled it on, then.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#44

Post by khr »

awalton wrote: post #41

...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life. I don't think it's even worth giving away 0.25% of battery life to detect whatever the 70k songs stored in the database is, nor is it worth the space the database is taking up on the device. The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search throu…

I have found it to be a useful feature that is worth the 1% daily battery life. I prefer it to Shazam/Soundhound because it's passive. I don't have to unlock my phone, open an app, press a button, and wait for the app to recognize the music. That whole process is disruptive to conversation if I'm with someone. How often the question of "what song is this" comes up depends on who you are, and it has occurred to me often enough such that I've recognized that I much prefer using Now Playing.

I agree that the database is a major limitation, although for me it acts as a first pass to see if the song I'm listening to is popular enough to be recognized.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#45

Post by [deleted] »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #29
xr4ti wrote: post #17

> Now Playing, has a daily battery usage of less than 1% on average, respects user privacy by running entirely on-device and can passively recognize a wide range of music. Maybe I am missing something, but this seems to be much less respectful of my privacy than an app that only listens to the ambient sound around me when I explicitly give my consent (by opening/activating the app).

What's your actual privacy concern? If the whole process happens entirely on-device, then this reveals absolutely no information of any kind to anyone, correct?

[deleted]

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#46

Post by remir »

awalton wrote: post #41

...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life. I don't think it's even worth giving away 0.25% of battery life to detect whatever the 70k songs stored in the database is, nor is it worth the space the database is taking up on the device. The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search throu…

Yeah, I agree. If the phone doesn't recognize the song you want, you'll use Shazam anyway. So in the end, you can't trust the system 100% so the benefits of having this feature are pretty limited.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#47

Post by sly010 »

awalton wrote: post #41

...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life. I don't think it's even worth giving away 0.25% of battery life to detect whatever the 70k songs stored in the database is, nor is it worth the space the database is taking up on the device. The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search throu…

I would argue that it's not worth my 30 seconds to unlock my phone and open Shazam (which btw turns on the display and the radio, which then triggers other apps to poll for notifications, so there goes your 1%)

I would also bet the database is probably not much bigger then the shazam app itself.

I frankly just find it a well balanced solution both in terms of UX and in terms of engineering.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#48

Post by obelos »

manol74 wrote: post #16

Great work, but super scary for me. The "service" of music recognition will probably be extended very quickly to a constantly running "environment recognition", just fingerprinting the audio around you, places, speakers etc..

Yes, this has a “proof of concept” feel to it.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#49

Post by awalton »

sly010 wrote: post #47
awalton wrote: post #41

...this doesn't seem like it is at all worth giving up 1% of battery life. I don't think it's even worth giving away 0.25% of battery life to detect whatever the 70k songs stored in the database is, nor is it worth the space the database is taking up on the device. The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search throu…

I would argue that it's not worth my 30 seconds to unlock my phone and open Shazam (which btw turns on the display and the radio, which then triggers other apps to poll for notifications, so there goes your 1%) I would also bet the database is probably not much bigger then the shazam app itself. I frankly just find it a well balanced solution both in terms of UX and in terms of engineering.

> it's not worth my 30 seconds to unlock my phone

It takes me ~4 "seconds" (saying "one-one thousand" aloud) to do it when typing in a password (sorry, don't have a stopwatch handy). Just did it 10 times just to test. It'd be even faster with pin/fingerprint/face unlocking, or with no locking at all.

I also used Shazam and Google's "what song is this" feature for somewhere less than 5 minutes on the initial few seconds of 10 songs and my battery indicator didn't move a single percentage during my testing. Shazam scored 10/10, Google missed one (a song from an esoteric Chicago band called Terminal Bliss - all of the songs I chose were intentionally fairly obtuse to try to find missing info in the databases).

But I can say with fair assurances Google's not shipping their entire database on phones, just whatever's most popular up to some (probably size driven) limit; any given CD releases with about ten songs, any given year sees tens of thousands of CD releases (about 75,000 albums in 2010 alone). Worse, the entire feature's use case is better suited towards less popular music since you're less likely to know the song's name if it's new or esoteric - so you can almost immediately guess that those 70k songs in that database is just ~30 years of various genre chart topping hits.

All you've done is cement my convictions that this is absolutely a solution in search of a problem.

Re: Continuous low-power music recognition

#50

Post by Nemi »

awalton wrote: post #49
sly010 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it's not worth my 30 seconds to unlock my phone and open Shazam (which btw turns on the display and the radio, which then triggers other apps to poll for notifications, so there goes your 1%) I would also bet the database is probably not much bigger then the shazam app itself. I frankly just find it a well balanced solution both in terms of UX and in terms of engineering.

> it's not worth my 30 seconds to unlock my phone It takes me ~4 "seconds" (saying "one-one thousand" aloud) to do it when typing in a password (sorry, don't have a stopwatch handy). Just did it 10 times just to test. It'd be even faster with pin/fingerprint/face unlocking, or with no locking at all. I also used Shazam and Google's "what song is this" feature for somewhere less than 5 minutes on the initial few secon…

> It takes me ~4 "seconds" (saying "one-one thousand" aloud) to do it when typing in a password (sorry, don't have a stopwatch handy). Just did it 10 times just to test. It'd be even faster with pin/fingerprint/face unlocking, or with no locking at all.

Ah, but did you test this in your quiet office or home, sitting at your desk with both hands free?

Let's try a real-world environment. Something like, say, driving in your car, in moderate traffic, with both hands on the wheel while listening to your radio. That ~4 seconds becomes a barrier-to-entry just large enough to abandon the idea of finding out what the name is to that song you are listening to.

Because, lets be honest, wondering what the song is isn't that important. But it is nice. Which is why this feature has some proponents.

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