A new Spotify patent reveals it is developing an invention that monitors user speech and emotional state for it to come up with music suggestions.
Spotify recently filed a patent that revealed it is working on a new invention that would allow the company to suggest music to a particular user based on his speech and emotional state. Submitted in October of last year, Spotify's filing said that behavioral variables like the mood of the users, their favorite music genre, and demography, "correspond to different traits of a user."
In its previous patent applications, Spotify suggests it could promote personalized content, perhaps audio advertising items, as well as podcast and music content, to users based on personality traits that the company detected. Today, a new US Spotify patent reveals that the company wants to use speech recognition to determine the "emotional state, gender, accent, or age." Spotify said these are attributes it can use to recommend the type of music the user needed at a particular time.
#Apple Spotify patent reveals work on technology to suggest music by monitoring user speech and emotion https://t.co/BNJEc6VSlb pic.twitter.com/MgAFVPd09m — Frank Brown (@iAskTank) January 28, 2021
Identifying Playable Content
Spotify's new patent, titled "Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal," showed the company filed it in February of 2028 and the US Patent Office approved it on January 12, 2021. The new patent detailed how the company developed a "method for processing a provided audio signal that includes speech content and background noise" and "identifying playable content, based on the processed audio signal content." Spotify said it developed technology that allows it to suggest music to the user based on his speech and emotional state.
The company, in its patent filing, explained that it is normal for a media streaming application like Spotify to embrace features that would allow it to provide the user with personalized media recommendations. With their technology, they can suggest music based on the user's speech and emotional state. "A more basic approach might simply categorize [a user's] emotion into happy, angry, afraid, sad or neutral," Spotify said.
Retrieving Content Metadata
Some industry observers find Spotify's technology a bit unsettling, particularly since it covers aspects of variable human traits. Sources from within the company disagree, saying their technology, which would allow them to suggest music to users based on their speech and emotional state, helps a lot. Spotify can suggest calming music to agitated users and hopeful tunes to distraught listeners. According to its patent, the Spotify app can categorize the mood of the user as "happy, angry, sad or neutral."
The company did not explain whether it will integrate the technology into current versions of its app, though there are indications Spotify might do that soon. The company said that with the capability to suggest music to users based on their speech and emotional state, they can serve their listeners better.
