Spotify Now Lets You Have a Real Conversation to Pick Your Next Song
A new chat assistant built into the app lets Premium subscribers talk or type their way to the perfect playlist, in real time.
Key points
- Spotify launched an interactive AI chat assistant for Premium users in the US and two European markets on Tuesday.
- The feature works on iOS and Android for users aged 18 and over, in English only, and is a beta release still being tested.
- Users can type or speak to the app and hold a back-and-forth conversation about music, podcasts or audiobooks.
- Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch that the assistant blends its own AI with models from several outside providers.
- The assistant can save songs, queue tracks or follow artists, all through conversation.
Spotify wants you to stop scrolling and start talking. The streaming giant has rolled out a conversational AI assistant, think a chatbot, a piece of software you can have a written or spoken back-and-forth with, built directly into its app.
Premium subscribers in the US, Ireland and Sweden can now open Spotify on their phone, tap the chat feature on the Home or Now Playing screen, and just ask for what they want.
Say you are cooking dinner and want something new. You could type "play some artists I haven't heard before," then follow up with "make it more upbeat" or "add some Arctic Monkeys in there." The app responds and adjusts. No playlist-building. Just a conversation.
Beyond picking music, the assistant answers questions about your listening habits: when you first played a track, which genres you have been streaming lately, what inspired a particular song. It handles those too.
This goes further than Spotify's existing AI DJ, a feature that plays music and commentary in a generated voice. The new assistant works across the whole app, not just inside the DJ experience.
Spotify has not named the specific AI models powering this. The company told TechCrunch it combines its own technology with models from multiple outside providers, chosen depending on the task.
Should you worry about your data?
No dedicated privacy notice for the feature has appeared yet. The assistant will almost certainly read your listening history and personal taste data to give useful answers, which is how it knows what you have played and when. That is the same data Spotify already holds. If you are uncomfortable with an AI feature reading your full listening history, check your Spotify privacy settings and see what data sharing you have already agreed to.
This kind of in-app conversational control is exactly what our Siri coverage on 13 July flagged as the direction consumer AI is heading: the interface becomes a conversation, not a menu.
The feature is a beta, so expect occasional odd answers or suggestions that miss the mark. Spotify says user feedback will shape how it improves.
Access is free if you already pay for Spotify Premium. There is no sign of this coming to free-tier users yet.
The rollout is happening now on mobile in the three launch markets. Worth watching: whether Spotify names its model partners and what the privacy notice actually says when it arrives.
