Spotify wants to suggest music based on the emotional state reflected in your voice.
The music streaming app wants to offer you increasingly personalized recommendations, beyond those reflected by its algorithms based on your activity on the platform. And to do so, it has proposed a voice recognition technology to take into account a number of user details before moving on to recommendations.
Spotify wants to offer you more personalized recommendations by understanding your emotional state from your voice
Spotify has suggestions based on your playback history, lists of recommendations sorted into music style, mood or different activities. By using AI, it also prepares lists of trends, new releases and special lists that come up at different seasons of the year.
However, the company wants to go a step further with its suggestions to give more personalized recommendations. To do this, Spotify filed a patent a few years ago that proposes to use voice recognition to analyze a series of user data that can help personalize recommendations. A patent that already received its approval in the first days of January.
So through this voice recognition technology, Spotify could analyze the user’s voice to suggest recommendations based on a series of criteria, for example, age, accent or even emotional state reflected in the voice. Or it could also go a step further, and analyze the environment, to know if the recommendations will be oriented to a user, a group of people, etc.
All the information gathered by analyzing the user’s voice would be complemented with the user’s activity on the platform, and even the playlists of their friends. In that way, it would not only offer a personalized playlist for the user, but would also prevent the user from having to manually configure their preferences.
Of course, this data only shows the full potential that this Spotify technology would have, without taking into account other factors, for example, privacy and data usage. An ethical analysis that is not lost on Spotify researchers, as they mentioned in one of their articles.