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

Spotify, the music streaming service that once suggested the way to earn more from the service, is to create more music, has now filed a new patent that some critics fear the service could lead to listening to conversations.

According to the Music Business Worldwide report, Spotify feels that the type of music you want to listen to depends on your mood and recommends their content (and most likely ads) based on your personality traits. According to the report:

As a new U.S. Spotify patent, the company wants to use technology to get deeper into the minds of users, using speech recognition to determine their “emotional state, gender, age or accent” – features that can then be used to recommend content. . [..]

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

You can read the patent here. Spotify justifies its patent by saying that users simply have to say what they want is too tedious, and ‘What’s needed’ is a very different approach to gathering a user’s taste traits, especially one rooted in technology, so that the the above human activity (e.g. the user’s requirement to provide input) is at least partially eliminated and done more efficiently. “

The patent suggests that the acquisition of ‘intonation, tension, rhythm and types of speech units’ can be combined with’ acoustic information within a hidden Markov model architecture ‘, so that Spotify’s app can categorize a user’s mood as’ happy, angry, sad or neutral ‘”.

Spotify further defended their position Haystack by 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 currently have no news to share. ‘