Enhancing Your Listening Journey: Why Spotify’s AI DJ Needs to Tune Into Local Headlines

Key Takeaways

• Spotify’s AI DJ is an effective way to listen to music with personalized touchpoints and new music discovery.
• The AI DJ uses voice model and recommendation algorithms to enhance the listening experience.
• Adding personalized news updates to the AI DJ feature could make it even more indispensable.

I thought Spotify’s AI DJ was just a gimmick, but after trying it out I find in many cases it’s my preferred way to have Spotify play in the background as as I drive, work, or relax. However, I’d love it if the AI DJ could expand on its limited “daily drive” music and news feature, and give me personalized news that will once and for all replace radio for me.

What Spotify DJ Is (and Isn’t)

As far as I can tell, and based on what I’ve read, the Spotify AI DJ is a combination of several technologies. There’s the voice model, based on the voice of a real person who works for Spotify. Then there’s the recommendation algorithms that take your listening history, time of day, and other tidbits of info into account.

The AI voice will chat a little between some tracks, relate some of the reasons behind its choices, and let you know when it’s trying something new. Of course, the actual song selection is just a vocalized version of the song-discovery tech you can activate on any playlist. It’s just being packaged as if a radio DJ is doing the work. The vocal model sounds great, and I’ve never thought it gives away that it’s not really a person speaking.

It’s not anything like the advanced two-way chatbots we have access to now, which might be a cool idea at some point for someone to try. Being able to speak to my AI DJ while driving could be a cool feature, but it really boils down to an excellent synthesized voice and text generator that throws songs at you.

Spotify DJ Is Better Than Radio

I’ll be honest, I left listening to the radio behind a long, long, time ago. As soon as I got a car with an easy-to-use sound input to hook up my phone, I was no longer going to listen to the banality of mainstream radio anymore. I would only listen to music I liked, and didn’t have to deal with advertising. Still, this was pretty much like listening to an infinite mixtape (remember those?) and while that’s fine, it does lack the few charms that radio has.

Using the AI DJ, I actually think this is the perfect balance of breaking the music up a little, and bringing something different to the wall of noise. Every few tracks the AI DJ will say a few words, let me know what’s coming, and it feels like a much more relaxed way to listen to music.

Pulling In News Would Make It Indispensable

So that got me thinkng—if you already have the synthesized voice, the power of LLMs, and a live internet connection, why not have your AI DJ read something else? It would be like the existing “Your Daily Drive “ feature, but be just as customized as the music playlist. I would never have to hear news about politics or (shudder) sports, but could get periodic updates on the headlines for things I actually care about.

In fact, this has me thinking about how these new machine learning services could be used to proactively push customized content to us live the way that old broadcast media does. It would combine the couch-potato passivity of listening to a broadcast, with the targeted customization of doing a web search in a browser. I don’t actually care who does this, but Spotify already seems to be 80% there with the AI DJ feature, so it feels like the fastest way to get to the AI radio service I want would be to build on what they already have.

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