Ask AI About a Track
Tap the ✨ Sparkles button on the Now Playing screen to open the AI ask panel for the current track. You can ask anything about the song, the artist, the album, or the lyrics — and the AI answers using verified data from your library, not guesses from the internet.
Requires Apple Intelligence — iPhone 15 Pro or later, or any M-chip iPad, running iOS 26+, with Apple Intelligence enabled in Settings.
Opening the Panel
Tap the sparkle icon (✨) in the action button row on the Now Playing screen.
[SCREENSHOT: AI ask panel open — suggested prompts visible at the top]
Suggested Prompts
The panel opens with quick-tap suggested questions:
- Tell me about this artist
- What genre is this song?
- What are the themes and meaning of this song?
- What album is this from and when was it released?
- (If synced lyrics are available) Lyrics & meaning
Tap any to send immediately without typing.
Quick Actions
Two quick-action chips appear above the suggestions:
▤ Playlist — Generates a playlist of similar artists from your library, based on the current track’s sound and genre.
🔍 Identify — Runs Shazam identification on the current track. Same result as using the Identify Track button in the Track Info Panel.
Asking Questions
Type any question in the input field and tap ↗ Send (or press Return).
[SCREENSHOT: Response card with answer text, tool badges, and follow-up pills]
The response shows:
- The answer in 2–5 sentences
- Tool badges — small labels showing which data sources the AI actually read to answer your question
- Action chips — tap to play an artist, play an album, or generate a playlist
- Follow-up question pills — contextual suggestions to continue the conversation
- Artist Card — when you ask about the artist, a compact card showing their genres, origin, formation year, and members appears below the response
How the AI Answers — Tool Calling
The AI doesn’t answer from memory or the internet. It uses Apple’s on-device Foundation Models framework (FoundationModels, iOS 26+), which runs the language model entirely on your device. When you ask a question, the model is given access to a set of tools it can call to retrieve real data before writing its response.
The model is instructed: every factual claim must come from a tool result or the verified artist database. It is explicitly forbidden from filling in gaps from its training data, and will say “I don’t have that detail in my records” rather than guess.
The tools available depend on what data exists for the current track:
| Tool | When it’s available | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| getLyrics | Track has embedded lyrics | Full lyrics for meaning/theme questions |
| getRelatedTracks | Library has other tracks by this artist | Other songs and albums you own |
| getTrackMetadata | Track has been Shazam-identified | Verified genres, ISRC, Apple Music ID |
| getTrackMusicTheory | Track has been analyzed (Analyze Key & Mood) | Key, mood, BPM, diatonic chords, detected chords |
| getArtistFacts | Artist is in the database | Biography, origin, members, notable albums |
Tool Badges
Small badges in the response header show exactly which tools the AI called:
- Lyrics — read your embedded lyrics to answer the question
- Tonic — read the music theory analysis (key, mood, chords)
- Shazam — read Shazam-verified catalog data
- Library — checked your library for related tracks or albums
If no badges appear, the AI answered from the artist database alone.
Artist Card
When the model calls getArtistFacts to answer a question about the artist, a compact Artist Card appears below the response showing verified genres, origin, formation year, and current members — all sourced from the curated artist database, not the model’s training memory.
[SCREENSHOT: Artist Card below a response — genre pills, origin chip, member chips]
Playlist Generation
Tap the ▤ Playlist quick-action chip to generate a playlist of similar artists from your library. The AI searches your library for artists whose verified genre tags match the current track’s sound, then selects a coherent set and saves the playlist automatically.
Tap ▶ Play Now in the result card to start it immediately. The playlist is also saved to your Playlists tab.
What the AI Will and Won’t Say
The AI is grounded strictly in your library data and the verified artist database. It will answer confidently about anything in those sources. For anything not in those sources — unverified credits, release details not in your tags, collaborators not in the database — it will say it doesn’t have that information rather than guess.
This means answers are reliable but may occasionally be incomplete for obscure artists or tracks without Shazam metadata or music theory analysis. Running Identify Track and Analyze Key & Mood on a track adds those data sources and produces richer answers.
Starting Over
Tap Start over below any response to clear the conversation and return to the suggested prompts.