Spotify wants to listen to your conversations to better recommend music to you

Spotify, the music streaming service that once suggested the way to make more on the service was to make more music, has now filed a new patent that some critics fear the service will start listening to conversations.

According to a report by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify believes that the type of music you want to listen to depends on your mood and wants to recommend content (and possibly advertising) based on your personality traits. According to the report:

A new US patent Spotify, the company wants to use the technology to go even deeper into the heads of its users, using speech recognition to determine their “emotional state, gender, age or accent” – attributes that can then be used to recommend content. [..]

According to the filing, SPOT’s new patent covers a “method of processing a supplied audio signal that includes speech content and background noise” and then “identifying playable content, based on the content of the processed audio signal ”.

You can read the patent here. Spotify justifies its patent by saying that asking users to just say what they want is too tedious, and “What is needed is an entirely different approach to collecting a user’s taste attributes, especially a technology-rooted approach so that the human activity described above (for example, requiring a user to provide input) is at least partially eliminated and performed more efficiently. “

The patent suggests that obtaining “intonation, stress, rhythm, and other units of speech” could be combined with “acoustic information in a hidden Markov model architecture” so that the Spotify app could categorize it. mood of a user as “happy, angry, sad or neutral”.

Spotify further defended its position Pitchfork saying, “Spotify has filed patent applications for hundreds of inventions, and we regularly file new applications. Some of these patents will be part of future products, while others are not. I haven’t. no news to share at this time. “