Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The latest Google app beta adds a shortcut to song search history for Circle to Search.
- There’s also a new translate button that appears after something is circled.
Circle to Search is a useful tool that can be used for a variety of purposes, from helping you find the name of a song to translating foreign languages. Since its debut, Google has been continually improving the feature by adding new abilities. In our latest APK teardown, we found that more changes are on their way.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
While investigating the most recent beta of the Google app (version 16.22.44.sa.arm64 beta), we discovered two new changes to Circle to Search. These changes relate to the song recognition and translation functions.
Starting with the music ID tool, a new icon now appears when you search for a song. After you activate Circle to Search and tap on the music note icon, you will now see a history icon in the top right corner of the screen. This icon is a shortcut to the “Recent song searches” page, which began rolling out to beta testers in April. Here you’ll be able to view all of your past searches, complete with song titles, thumbnails, and artist info.
Next up, we have an additional button for translation. Currently, you can translate the entire screen by tapping on the translate button in Circle to Search. However, you lose the opportunity to translate if you circle something first. In this situation, you’ll have to close out of Circle to Search and trigger it again if you want to translate some text.
It looks like this will change soon, as a new translate button now appears after something is circled. You can check out the video above for an example.
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