As of January 12, a U.S. Spotify patent has now been granted – “Identifying Taste Attributes of an Audio Signal,” originally filed in 2018, which will allow the broadcast service to monitor the daily speech of ‘a user in an effort to customize user recommendations.
This patent also extends to background noise in addition to daily speech and will help the platform determine the emotional state, gender, age or accent of users and aims to quantify this data by attributing the ‘entry into a range of emotions:’ happy, sad, ‘angry or neutral,’ reports Music Business Worldwide.
These moods are determined by several factors, and Spotify will monitor “intonation, stress, pace, and speech unit types” to make those determinations.
Spotify currently collects some of this personal information through a brief questionnaire, but this approach is now considered outdated and “tedious” for the user. Basically, all those options you have to enter when setting up your profile fall into disrepair so that Spotify can hear everything you say, even if it’s a bird stepping outside or cars in it circulen.
He then outlined the apparent need for this intrusive method of data collection: “What is needed is a completely different approach to collecting a user’s taste attributes, particularly one that is rooted in technology so that the ‘human activity described above (for example, which requires a user to provide input) is at least partially eliminated and performed more efficiently. “
Whatever Spotify recommends you in the future, at least we still have this AI robot that will make you enjoy music.