Spotify has received a patent with technology that aims to use recordings of users’ speech and background noise to determine what type of music to clean and recommend, reports Music Business Worldwide. The company filed the patent in 2018; was approved on January 12, 2021.
The patent outlines the potential uses of the technology that involves extracting “intonation, stress, rhythm and units of speech” from the user’s voice. The technology could also use speech recognition to identify metadata points, such as emotional state, gender, age, accent, and even environment – that is, whether someone is alone or with others – based on the audio recording.
The patent filing highlights how Spotify currently uses a decision tree – showing users different artists, genres and more – to help refine its user recommendation algorithm. “What is needed is a completely different approach to collecting a user’s taste attributes, especially one that is rooted in technology, so that the human activity described above (e.g., the need for a user to provide input) is at least partially eliminated and made more efficient ”, it is shown in the file. Find the patent below.
It is currently unclear whether Spotify has set a roadmap for implementing this technology in its desktop or mobile applications or what form this implementation could take. It is also unclear whether the technology currently exists or whether the patent is speculative. It should be noted that it is not abnormal for technology companies to patent technology that does not reach the market.
A Spotify spokesperson provided the following statement to Pitchfork:
Read “Could the new Spotify discovery be considered Payola?” over pitch.