The Spotify Wrapped animation the annual recap of your listening habits, concurrently beloved and reviled, is again. But in 2024, the flashy visuals can be accompanied by a model new audio add-on made with synthetic intelligence.
Starting at the moment, Spotify customers could have the choice to take heed to their annual report as a personalised, AI-powered podcast through which two artificial hosts enthusiastically talk about the consumer’s most listened to songs and favourite artists.
The new podcast abstract is powered by Google’s NotebookLM. If you have used Google’s AI device to generate an audio podcast on a subject you are researching, the 2 AI-generated voices within the Wrapped podcast will sound acquainted. The voices, which Spotify calls “AI hosts,” will have interaction in a brief dialog about you and your 2024 listening patterns. The function can be out there in English within the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada , Ireland and Spotify’s house nation of Sweden. And similar to the long-running visible iteration of Wrapped, the AI podcast can be simply shareable.
The podcast is totally personalised. The two hosts tackle customers by identify and communicate within the second individual. In addition to providing you with arduous knowledge (like your high artist and whole variety of minutes spent listening), hosts will analyze the info Spotify has collected about you. They’ll flatter you: They’ve instructed me I’m a “tastemaker” and referred to as my musical tastes “so totally different” and “so distinctive.” They will extrapolate the small print of your way of life based mostly in your listening habits. For instance, they instructed me they might think about me strutting down the road in pink pilates gear to Chappel Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova,” and assumed I used to be singing alongside to the Rent soundtrack when you’re within the bathe. They expressed curiosity about my life, at one level questioning what I used to be doing on January 9, the day I listened to extra minutes of music than another day in 2024.
This is not the primary time Spotify has integrated AI-powered voice into the Wrapped expertise. Last yr, the platform’s resident DJ AI, referred to as DJ Spanish, indicating that the corporate sees a future in AI-generated audio.
This AI-enhanced model of Wrapped comes at a time when customers are expressing issues about Big Tech’s surveillance of their conduct and rampant knowledge assortment. Spotify particularly has come below fireplace for rebranding its exact monitoring of consumer exercise as a comfy, shareable vacation reward. Listeners have additionally been gradual to embrace AI-generated podcasts, which generally function cloying digital hosts who appear creepy of their makes an attempt to sound human.
