A Spotify patent in the United States – “Identifying the flavor attributes of an audio signal” – originally registered in 2018 has now been granted on January 12, which will allow the streaming service the ability to monitor a user’s daily speech in an effort to push personalized recommendations to the user.
This patent also extends to background noise beyond daily speech and will help the platform to determine a user’s “emotional state, gender, age or accent” and aims to quantify that data by assigning input to a range of emotions: “happy, sad, angry or neutral “, reports Music Business Worldwide.
These moods are determined by a number of factors and Spotify will monitor “intonation, emphasis, rhythm and speech units” to make these determinations.
Currently, Spotify already collects some of this personal information through a brief questionnaire, but this approach is now seen as outdated and “tedious” for the user. Basically, all the options you need to enter when establishing your profile are falling out of favor, so Spotify can hear everything you say, even if it’s a bird singing outside or cars passing by.
Further describing the apparent need for this intrusive data collection method, the filing states: “What is needed is a totally different approach to collecting flavor attributes from a user, particularly one who is rooted in technology so that the above human activity described (for example, requiring a user to provide data) is at least partially eliminated and executed more efficiently. “
Whatever Spotify’s recommendation in the future, at least we still have this AI robot that will toast your musical taste.