For a little less than a year, we’ve been seeing Spotify do purchase after purchase and product update after product update to establish a point of support in the ad targeting space. Now, the company is launching a new dataset for this purpose: your voice.
This update was a footnote for the new Spotify voice commands that were first seen on Wednesday of GSMArena. While the company has not made an official announcement about the new feature, some iOS and Android Spotify have begun to notice instructions for activating a new voice search feature within the app. SSimilar to how you might say “Hey Google” or “Hey Alexa” for your smart home devices, the new Spotify feature asks users to say: “Hey Spotify” as a way of activation.
While I didn’t do it personally you receive a notificationI noticed that I could also activate this function by pressing the “settings” button in my Spotify application and activating “Voice interactions”.
It is worth noting here that Spotify has tested this wake-up feature in its mobile application almost a year now. Back in 2019, the company even started testing a similar tool for people who could drive, called – I’m not even kidding – “Machine work. ”
After downloading the update, one of the first things I noticed was that this update is much kinder for some artists, unlike others. Telling Spotify to play, say, the Beatles or Pink Floyd, or newly baptized Grammy Award winner Take Lipa and you will receive what you ask for. This is not always the case with more obscure artists or those with difficult-to-pronounce names. As an example, no matter how many times I tried to get Spotify to play an album by the experimental noise-rock duo Xiu Xiu (pronounced “shoo shoo, “For those at home), Spotify would not stop singing the funk hit of the 70’s”Shoes Polished Shoes.”
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Another nugget that came out of my mind was that when I turned on this feature, Spotify pointed me to a page which set out exactly how my voice data will be collected, stored, and used.
The first thing Spotify mentions on this page is that by activating these controls, you are not only activating “Hey Spotify ” characteristic but also others – even potentially “interacting with some commercials” using your voice. In fact, voice ads are an idea that Spotify has been beating for about two years: Back in may In 2019, the company launched a limited running ads for certain Spotify podcasts – if users said a certain magic word, it it would direct them to listen on the last episode of the show.
Since then, it looks like the company has just been launched a major Voice advertising campaign last summer, but has been relatively quiet about the project since then. Rlooking for this new “Hey Spotify ” The campaign could be a way to quietly push more users to bring these types of voice ads to their devices, albeit in a semi-hidden way. In a similar way, Spotify also notes in its policy that your voice data will be used to provide you with more “relevant”, ie targeted, ads.
In terms of brightness, Spotify clearly shows that it only exists some voice data that are used for this purpose. According to the policy, Spotify only starts receiving your voice data when you say the watchword (or press the record button) until “Spotify processes your question or request.” Also, your phone “will always tell you when Spotify is receiving your voice input,” the company added. “For example with a visual indicator or an audible tone.”