Picture this. You find yourself in a situation that absolutely demands a particular kind of music. You need background noise for a socially-distant gathering, or a heart-wrenching ballad to accompany the sound of you crying into a tub of ice cream after a bad break up. But you don’t have the right playlists put together and aren’t really in the mood to go out and find suitable songs. Well, Spotify aims to eliminate this problem using speech recognition to suggest tracks suited to your “emotional state”.
That’s right. Now Spotify will listen to you. Using your device’s microphone, Spotify will be able to observe a user’s environment and emotions with speech recognition technology, and then suggest appropriate music.
According to BBC News, Spotify explained that this is an attempt to “provide personalized media recommendations” to listeners without putting them through the tedium of answering surveys meant to discern their music tastes.
Speech recognition will be used to pick up personal details about users, like age and gender, and will also look for indicators of a user’s mood based on things like the “intonation” and “rhythm” of their speech.
Spotify will take this into consideration alongside listening history, library, followed artists, and more to fine-tune it’s song recommendations.
Slowly but surely, the app is becoming the perfect partner. I can’t speak for everyone, but, based on the playlists Spotify has put together for me so far, it clearly knows me better than even I do. And now it’s going to be perfectly tuned in to my emotions? Swoon.
However, this raises concerns and questions as to how this might affect the privacy of Spotify users. WhatsApp’s new terms and conditions have recently come under fire for demanding more personal information from users, and there have long been concerns over smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa listening in to users’ conversations. Although Spotify promises transparency and to treat “digital history” sensitively and ethically, users should keep the potential for this new feature to invade their privacy in mind if they decide to continue using the app.
(Source: BBC News)
