“Every time I flush the toilet, my Pixel 6 Pro detects Adele’s Rumor Has It playing.” And the curious story to say the least told on Reddit by a user, with the Pixel function Now Playing to play the role of unhappy as much as the absolute protagonist. For those who don’t know, Now Playing is the software found by Google with the second generation Pixel that analyzes the sounds in the vicinity of the phone to identify the songs that may be playing, and has been recently renewed.
The tarnishing of the algorithm on a song, among the millions in the databases, can also be there – even if we can imagine that Adele is not enthusiastic about it -, but the point is that the post on Reddit ended up being viral and many other users have reported similar cases. “My Pixel 3 Mistakes the Sound of My Electric Toothbrush for REM’s The Great Beyond”, one user replied, “My Pixel 6 Pro shower noise for The Rain by Oran” Juice “Jones”, another echoes him. And so on.
Scrolling through the comments that crowded the post in a few hours, you find out about everyone, but by combining the points you conclude that despite the several years of operation the detection of songs in the vicinity of the Pixels – not just the Pixel 6 or Pixel 6 Pro – would be subject to slips, too sensationally clumsy like what Adele brings up.
The conditional is a must because of course verifying user reports is impossible, but it is not hard to believe that the Now Playing algorithm and its artificial intelligence can sometimes get bogged down on the large numbers of sounds that populate the world. And it turns out that even the glittering intelligence of machines can fail.
