iOS 8 brought a lot of neat little improvements that aren’t immediately apparent, and one that I’ve found especially useful is Shazam integration with Siri. This allows you to easily identify any track that’s playing on speakers near you, without having to unlock your device.
Say ‘What’s playing now’ and Siri will Shazam it for you
To identify a track with Siri:
- Play any song on a device or speakers, if it’s not already playing.
- Hold the home button on your iOS device to invoke Siri and ask, “What song is playing?”
- Siri will respond by saying: “Let me listen.”, “Listening” or something similar, and take a few seconds to recognize the track and display the results.
- You can of course do this by invoking Siri without pressing the home button.
Nifty, isn’t it? But this doesn’t mean that the free Shazam app is now redundant: you can still use it to check out track previews and YouTube videos, and buy them via iTunes, share your finds on social networks, and plug in to Rdio, Spotify or Deezer to listen to your favorite discoveries later.
Found any other handy new features in Siri on iOS 8? Let us know in the comments.
