A US patent for Spotify – “Identifying the attributes of taste in an audio signal” – originally filed in 2018 has now been granted since January 12, which will give the streaming service the ability to monitor a user’s daily speech in an effort to push custom recommendations to the user.
This patent extends to background noise in addition to everyday speech and will help the platform determine users’ “emotional state, gender, age or accent” and aims to quantify this data by assigning a range of emotions: “happy , sad, angry or neutral, “Music Business Worldwide reports.
These moods are determined by a number of factors, and Spotify will monitor the “intonation, stress, rhythm and tastes of speech units” to make those determinations.
Spotify is already collecting some of this personal information through a short questionnaire, but this approach is now seen as outdated and “boring” for the user. Basically, all those options you need to enter when setting your profile aren’t in your favor, so Spotify can listen to everything you say, even if it’s a bird chirping outside or cars moving.
Further describing the apparent need for this intrusive method of data collection, the submission states: “What is needed is a completely different approach to collecting a user’s taste attributes, especially one rooted in technology, so that the human activity described above (e.g., requiring a user to provide information) is at least partially removed and performed more efficiently. “
Whatever Spotify recommends you in the future, at least we still have this AI bot that will fry your taste in music.