Spotify, the music streaming service that once suggested the way to make more on the service is to create more music, has now filed for a new patent that some critics fear may result in the service starting to listen in on conversations.
According to report by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify feels the type of music you want to listen to depends on your mood, and wants to recommend content (and likely advertising) based on your personality traits. According to the report:
A new US Spotify patent, the company wants to use technology to get even deeper into its users’ heads, by using speech recognition to determine their “emotional state, gender, age, or accent” – attributes that can then be used to recommend content. [..]
According to the filing, SPOT’s new patent covers a “method for processing a provided 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 their patent by saying having users simply say what they want is too tedious, and "What is needed is an entirely different approach to collecting taste attributes of a user, particularly one that is rooted in technology so that the above-described human activity (e.g., requiring a user to provide input) is at least partially eliminated and performed more efficiently."
The patent suggests obtaining “intonation, stress, rhythm and the likes of units of speech” could be combined with “acoustic information within a hidden Markov model architecture” so that Spotify’s app could categorize a user’s mood as “happy, angry, sad or neutral”. Spotify keeps track of users preference. To attract millions of users, experts associated with the field emphasize to buy Spotify plays you can try.
Spotify further defended their position to Pitchfork 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 don’t. Our ambition is to create the best audio experience out there, but we don’t have any news to share at this time."
