It comes as no surprise that Spotify’s newest function, dubbed “DJ,” makes use of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Spotify’s established customization options, such as Discover Weekly and the material that appears on your home screen, are combined with some AI magic in an innovative new approach to instantly playing a curated selection of music.
The artificial intelligence spin on DJing is a virtual DJ that communicates with you via a synthetic voice created by Sonantic, a speech-generation business that Spotify acquired last year. That’s because the speech model used by the DJ here was trained using an actual human being. Both the DJ’s voice and the content it plays are computer-generated. A brief explanation of the algorithm used to choose the music that is now playing will appear at the top of the screen. After you begin a segment, you will hear a selection of songs that fall into that genre; however, you can always switch things up by tapping the DJ button in the presently playing screen’s bottom right corner.
The company Spotify claims that all of X’s conversation is created in real time by OpenAI and not recorded beforehand. In spite of this, the business stressed the need of making it clear that generative AI is seen as a tool for the company’s music editors and not something that is blindly trusted to do everything right. During a product demo with Engadget, Spotify’s VP of personalization Ziad Sultan explained that the company has assembled a writers room consisting of script writers, music editors, data curators, and engineers to ensure that the information dropped by the AI DJ is helpful, accurate, and contextually appropriate to the music being played.
Sultan emphasized that the application of AI to Spotify was quite different from free-form text processing, picture production, and other similar use cases.
Whether or if Spotify’s DJ can successfully play songs you choose is what will determine its success. From that vantage point, Spotify isn’t doing anything radically new from what it’s always done, which is to analyze your listening history and identify something it knows you like and stuff it believes you’ll love. Along with all of your Spotify activity, your DJ use will be monitored for improvement in the form of more relevant song recommendations.
