Pixel's best music feature is finally coming to Apple, but not on the iPhone

Google Pixels have long championed a feature called “Now Playing,” which silently and continuously recognizes music playing around you, even before you ask for it. It’s a very convenient trick and saves you from having to manually Shazam a song. Apple is now borrowing this trick, not on the iPhone, but on the newest Apple Watches instead.

With the arrival of the S11 chip in the new Apple Watch Series 12 and the Apple Watch Ultra 4, Apple is removing the manual friction from ambient song identification. These new smartwatches come with Audio Intelligence, and within the feature, Apple notes that Shazam will now “instantly detect the music playing around the user and automatically display the song title and artist’s name on the Music Recognition widget in the Smart Stack, easily glanceable on the wrist.”

Until now, identifying music on an Apple Watch required active user participation. You had to wake the watch, trigger Siri or launch the Shazam app or complication, and wait while the microphone sampled audio before delivering a match. If a song was wrapping up as you walked into a café, you usually missed it, as I have plenty of times.

The new implementation seemingly turns Shazam on the Apple Watch into an ambient, passive identifier. Rather than waiting for user initiation, the new Apple Watches listen continuously in the background, automatically identify the track, and populate information about the recognized track directly into the watchOS Smart Stack. It essentially replicates the functionality that Google pioneered on Pixel devices, delivering zero-input song identification whenever music is detected nearby.

Apple emphasizes that Audio Intelligence runs with privacy safeguards in place, noting that raw audio is processed locally, never stored, and remains inaccessible to apps. Audio Intelligence also includes features like Live Rewind, which can show a text snippet of what was said around you in the preceding 15 seconds. Apple notes that Live Rewind is coming later in 2026, but doesn’t place a similar release timeline for the Shazam ambient music recognition feature, so presumably, it will be available on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at launch.