Spotify wants to hear your conversations to recommend better music

Spotify, a music streaming service that previously suggested that the way to earn more on the service is to create more music, has now filed for a patent that some critics fear could result in the service starting to listen 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 probably advertising) based on your personality traits. According to the report:

A new Spotify patent in the United States, the company wants to use technology to delve deeper into its users’ minds, using voice recognition to determine their “emotional state, gender, age or accent” – attributes that can then be used To recommend content. [..]

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

You can read the patent here. Spotify justifies its patent by saying that making users simply say what they want is very tedious and “What is needed is an entirely different approach to collecting a user’s flavor attributes, particularly one that is rooted in technology so that the human activity described above (for example, requiring a user to provide data) is at least partially eliminated and performed more efficiently. “

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

Spotify further defended its position to Pitchfork saying “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 do not. Our ambition is to create the best audio experience out there, but we don’t have no news to share at this point. “