TikTok is looking to take on YouTube Music and Shazam with a new feature called “Voice Search,” which lets you find a sound by singing, humming or playing it. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature is available to some users in select regions and is not yet available widely.
Voice search provides another way to find what you’re looking for on the app. And on a platform where song-based trends change quickly, the tool can also help you find and better understand current trends.
TikTok’s voice search feature is somewhat similar to YouTube Music’s song discovery tool, which lets you find the name of a song by singing, chanting, or playing it. While Shazam is undoubtedly the most popular song recognition tool, these new features from TikTok and YouTube Music go beyond what’s possible on Shazam because they let you identify songs by chanting or singing them, whereas Shazam only works if you play the actual song.
While Shazam and YouTube Music can help you find song names, TikTok’s tool isn’t just designed to find songs, but also to show you the videos that use them.
In my tests, I found that the more popular a song is on the app, the more likely the tool is to recognize it. For example, when I sang Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” the tool quickly recognized it and then showed me popular videos featuring the song or a remix of it. When I sang the popular song “Oh no oh no oh no no” The voice, the tool recognized almost immediately.
The tool seems to have a bit of a glitch when it comes to songs that aren’t used as sounds in many popular videos. While it was able to detect that Hilary Duff’s “Fly” was called “Fly,” it didn’t show me any videos containing the song, instead showing me generic results for the term “fly.” When I played One Direction’s “Magic,” it did the same thing.
TikTok told TechCrunch that the tool is designed to find songs, not TikTok-specific sounds. However, in our testing, we found that the tool was able to detect TikTok sounds/memes like “Oh my god, she’s bald. She’s bald, and she tortures people with hair!The audio was taken from an episode of Totally Spies andNobody will know.Audio created by a TikTok user.
If you have access to the feature, you can access it by going to the search bar in the app, tapping the microphone icon, and then selecting “Voice Search.”
Many people already use it. TikTok as a search engineThis latest feature further enhances the app’s search capabilities. The next time you have a song stuck in your head or hear a good tune in the wild, TikTok hopes you’ll head to its app instead of YouTube Music or Shazam — or even Google.
Sounds are an integral part of TikTok: they’re what drives trends and in some cases, leads to… Songs that topped the charts For artists. Given the importance of sounds on TikTok, it’s no surprise that the company is rolling out a way to boost song discovery on its platform while also cutting back on Shazam and YouTube Music.
It is not known when TikTok plans to launch the feature to all users.