So far, you’ve been getting music recommendations on your app based on your history. This includes your searches and what you’ve been listening to. Now, Spotify has taken a step ahead to provide recommendations based on your current mood. How are they possibly managing to do that?
So, here’s the story:
Spotify has developed a technology that can detect your mood and emotions based on voice recognition. The company applied for a patent to use this technology solely in February 2018. It was very recently on 12th January 2021 when they finally got permission to do so.
How Does Spotify’s Patented Technology Work?
We go back to October 2020 when Spotify published a technology that detected personality traits of their users for promoting content. They identified these traits based on demographics, favourite genre of music and mood. Initially, they used it only for personalized audio advertising content, which later moved on to promoting music and podcasts too.
Now, we come to the technology it has recently been granted a patent for. They call it the “Karaoke feature”. This time, it will figure out what kind of music you could be in the mood to hear at the moment using speech recognition. In fact, it’s not just speech, but the background noise too.
Basically, by listening to your voice, the software can determine your emotional condition, your accent, your gender and to some extent your age. The background noise might also help them understand what kind of an environment you’re currently in. All of these will help them determine one thing – what kind of music could you possibly be in the mood to listen to?
It is indeed a wonder to what extent technology can be used. By listening to your voice, the platform can determine if you’re happy, sad, angry, anxious or just neutral. And then, there is some background noise like the sound of birds, traffic or foot tapping that it can listen to as well. Additionally, it isn’t ignoring your search and streaming activities during that mood.
What Do You End Up Getting?
So, this is a step to know you better – what kind of music you prefer listening to in a specific mood and environment? In a while, the recommendations you’ll receive will exactly match your current mood.
We’ve already seen how shopping apps and search engines use our history to understand what we’re looking for. Spotify has now taken a step ahead to go beyond data collected from searches and dig deeper in our mind.
This may even sound a little scary to you. However, the researchers of Spotify do clarify that they follow ethical standards of data usage and assure that your privacy is not violated in any way.
