The Frustration of Gemini on Android’s Inability to Identify Songs

If it wasn’t clear before that Google’s Gemini chatbot was rushed out the door, it is now.

Gemini’s since-removed image generator put people of color in Nazi-era uniforms. The chatbot’s commentary continues to tend toward the absurd besides, like equating Hitler’s record with Elon Musk posting memes.

On Android, Gemini also breaks Google Assistant’s song recognition. And to me, after Gemini’s abhorrent cultural insensitivities, it’s one of the most frustrating things about it.

Let me explain.

I typically utilize Gemini on my somewhat outdated Samsung Galaxy A53 5G, a device that lacks substantial speed in the Android smartphones category. To increase its performance, I swapped the built-in homepage with a simplistic option, Niagara Launcher. It’s essentially an organized, alphabetized directory of the various apps installed on my handset.

Niagara is remarkable. However, its features are purposefully restricted, subsequently making me rely on Google Assistant – which I now refer to as Gemini – for conducting functions like setting up reminders, launching apps and so forth.

A favored Google Assistant-offered facility of mine was song identification, instigated with prompts like “OK Google, identify this song”. I used to use this quite frequently. It proved itself useful in locations such as nightclubs, restaurants, and bars to help remember songs that I would likely otherwise forget. There’s no scarcity of apps that can identify songs – Apple’s Shazam is a classic example. Yet, in the realm of precision, Google Assistant remained a strong contender, in my personal experience, at least.

It was thus particularly annoying for me to find out that Gemini, while being used on Android, does not have the ability to identify songs – nor can it successfully relay song identification requests to Google Assistant.

Ask Gemini, which takes the place of Google Assistant on Android, to identify a song, and it dares to recommend utilizing applications like Shazam — or switching back to Google Assistant. To add to the randomness, it will intermittently propose arbitrary songs from YouTube.

Image Credits: Google

This issue, trivial as it may seem in the grand scheme of things, has not escaped my attention. I could initiate song recognition from the Google Search application on Android. Alternatively, if I utilized a traditional home screen, I could set up a dedicated song ID shortcut.

However, it was Google Assistant’s low-entry song identification feature that made it so appealing, at least to this author. Starting the feature didn’t necessitate fiddling with an app or jotting anything down. A solitary voice command later and it was functioning, making it efficient and handy for when one needs to promptly identify a tune.

Making the song recognition situation more disheartening is the fact that I’m paying for the Google One AI Premium Plan, priced at $20 per month, which is supposed to afford me access to a more sophisticated, powerful Gemini experience. Perhaps it’s sophisticated in other ways — ways I haven’t discovered yet, frankly. But broken song recognition, along with missing basic features like the ability to play songs, create lists and more, make Gemini a very poor substitute for Google Assistant on Android at present.

Full transparency, I’ve reached out to Google about song recognition via Gemini and I’ll update this post if I hear back.

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