This feature allows users to search for audio by singing, humming, or playing through an intermediary source.
The company has confirmed with TechCrunch that the new feature is currently available to some users in certain regions and has not been widely rolled out yet.
Audio search on TikTok is somewhat similar to the song recognition tools of YouTube Music and Shazam.
Shazam is currently perhaps the most popular song recognition tool. However, the new features from TikTok and YouTube Music surpass Shazam in that they allow you to identify songs by humming or singing, whereas Shazam only works when the app "hears" the song being played.
In addition to helping you find the name of a song like Shazam and YouTube Music, TikTok's tool is also designed to show you videos that use that song.
From user testing, they found that the tool easily identifies popular songs on the app. However, for songs that are not widely used in popular videos, this feature struggles to find them.
According to TikTok's sharing with TechCrunch, this tool is designed to find songs on the market, not TikTok's own sounds. However, in another user test, it was able to recognize sounds on TikTok.
If you have access to this feature, you can find it by going to the search bar in the app, clicking on the microphone icon, and then selecting "Sound Search".
It is still unclear when TikTok plans to release this feature to all users.
