Gemini on Android Fails to Identify Songs: A Frustrating Experience

It's now abundantly clear that Google’s Gemini chatbot was hastily released.

The chatbot's previously available image generator displayed people of color in Nazi-era uniforms, a misstep that highlights its cultural insensitivity. Furthermore, its responses often veer into the nonsensical, like comparing Hitler’s historical actions to Elon Musk sharing memes.

On Android, Gemini disrupts Google Assistant’s song recognition capabilities. This issue, combined with Gemini's troubling insensitivity, is among the most frustrating aspects for me.

Let me elaborate.

I primarily use Gemini on my aging Samsung Galaxy A53 5G, which isn’t the fastest Android smartphone on the market. To improve its performance, I switched the default home screen to Niagara Launcher, a streamlined interface that lists my apps alphabetically.

While Niagara Launcher is highly efficient, it has design limitations that increased my reliance on Google Assistant—now replaced by Gemini—for tasks like setting timers and launching applications. Previously, I often used Google Assistant’s song recognition feature by saying, “OK Google, what’s this song?” It was a convenient tool in nightclubs, restaurants, and bars for identifying tracks I would otherwise forget. There are plenty of song-recognition apps—such as Shazam—but in my experience, Google Assistant excelled, particularly in terms of accuracy.

Imagine my frustration when I realized that Gemini on Android cannot recognize songs and doesn’t even channel song identification requests to Google Assistant. Instead, asking Gemini to identify a song prompts it to recommend using apps like Shazam or reverting back to Google Assistant. Occasionally, it’ll throw out random suggestions from YouTube for good measure.

I recognize this situation could be categorized as a minor inconvenience, given other alternatives like launching song recognition from the Google Search app. Additionally, if I were using a typical home screen setup, I could have a dedicated shortcut for song identification.

However, the true appeal of Google Assistant’s song recognition lies in its simplicity. Activating the feature required no complicated steps—just a voice command, making it exceptionally quick and useful for identifying songs on the fly.

What elevates my frustration is the fact that I’m subscribed to the Google One AI Premium Plan, which costs $20 per month. This plan is supposed to provide a more advanced experience with Gemini—yet the limited song recognition, along with the absence of basic functionalities like playing songs or creating playlists, make Gemini a far inferior alternative to Google Assistant on Android at this time.

For full transparency, I've reached out to Google regarding the song recognition feature in Gemini and will update this post should I receive a response.