Google Assistant will finally be able to identify songs

The Google Assistant is a truly commendable piece of software and perhaps one of Google's most impressive projects to date. However, despite all of the new features and tricks the Assistant's picked up over the past year, one constant that's remained is its infuriating inability to identify songs. Thankfully, this will all be changing very soon.

Ever since its debut, asking the Google Assistant "What song is this?" or "What's playing right now?" would return a response of "I can't identify songs yet." And, every time this response was issued, a little part of our souls would die. Google, why would a feature that's been available in the regular Google Search app for years not make its way to the Assistant? What did we do to deserve this special sort of hell?

We may never know the answer to that, but what we do know is that the folks at Android Police managed to get the Assistant to identify a song on the recently announced Pixel 2. Asking the Assistant to identify a song will now show a listening bar at the bottom like we've seen in Google Search before, and once the song is found, you'll get a card with lyrics, artist info, and links for apps that you can listen to it in.

Song identification will be rolling out to all other devices with the Google Assistant in the near future, and although we don't have an exact time frame quite yet, it's still reassuring to know that there's a light at the end of this offensively long tunnel.