There are times when you want to know the lyrics of a particular song and the signer’s accent or pronunciation prevents you from understanding all the words, perhaps the quality of the sound is not as good as you’d like an it makes it difficult to understand the lyrics, or maybe you just get caught up in the rhythm or the background music and you hear a word that makes you wonder what the rest of the lyrics are. Whichever the case, you might end up looking the lyrics up through various sites if you know the name of the song or a certain phrase. If you don’t know anything about the song, you might use Shazam and a few taps after the song has been recognized, it shows you the lyrics. What if you could play any song and the lyrics started showing up on your screen?
That would be certainly be convenient and that’s what the updated Genius app wants to achieve. There’s a new optional setting that allows the app to read some of your notifications looking for song titles and provide the respective lyrics, so basically, you can play music from a variety of sources and Genius will notify you when it has found the lyrics for the songs you play. This is only available on Android devices, as the openness of the operating system allows this way of interaction between apps. The developers behind the Genius app made it compatible with API 16 and more modern versions, which can “talk to everything, from your car to your Chromecast”, as said by one of the developers, Lisa Wray.
The developers promise that they will never access, read or save your notifications, but even if users decide not to enable this setting, Genius can now provide lyrics suggestions from app like Spotify, Play Music and Soundcloud, among others. Both of these settings can be disabled, though. The update also includes a new artist page with top songs and full music catalog. There are over 1.7 million lyrics available and users can see annotations in some of the highlighted lyrics. Additionally, there’s verified content from artists and producers which lets you know more facts about the song. The soundwave button will listen to whatever is playing and provide lyrics for that song.