Spotify To Monitor Users Speech To Recommend Music In New Patent

Spotify recently announced that they plan to utilize a technology that allows them to access background noise and users’ speech to better curate music suggestions for their subscribers. The streaming app was granted a patent for the technology on January 12 after they filed for it in 2018.

According to Pitchfork, the patent states that the use of this technology will give Spotify access to “intonation, stress, rhythm, and the likes of units of speech” based off of the user’s voice. Along with that, Spotify could access information like gender, age, race, accent and what environment the user is in and if they are around others.

While they have retrieved the patent for this, it does not necessarily guarantee that it will make it into the markets. In fact, it’s incredibly common that obtained patents don’t actually make it very far. “Spotify has filed patent applications for hundreds of inventions, and we regularly file new applications. Some of these patents become part of future products, while others don’t. Our ambition is to create the best audio and experience out there, but we don’t have any news to share at this time,” said a spokesperson for Spotify to Pitchfork.

Because technology is constantly evolving, it comes as no surprise that Spotify is looking ahead in finding ways to be creative with their music streaming experience. However, this new technology can potentially cause hesitation for users as it could possibly be seen as a breach of privacy. At this time, there is no information on whether or not subscribers could opt-out of this feature if Spotify were to move forward with it.

The streaming app was recently in headlines after it was announced that over 300,000 accounts were compromised because of a database being used to specifically target Spotify accounts. With this, the login credentials along with other private information for many subscribers had been obtained.

Shortly after that, the Spotify pages for artists like Lana Del Rey, Future, Dua Lipa and many more were hacked. A user under the name of Daniel Lahooti was able to hack their pages on Spotify and posted photos asking for followers on Snapchat. The hack was very short-lived.