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 United States, Ireland, and Sweden on Tuesday.
- The feature works on iOS and Android for users aged 18 and over, in English only, and is currently a beta release, meaning it is still being tested and refined.
- Users can type or speak to the app and hold a back-and-forth conversation about music, podcasts, and audiobooks.
- Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch AI that the assistant uses a blend of Spotify's own AI technology and models from several outside providers.
- The assistant can save songs, queue tracks, and 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, no searching. Just a conversation.
Beyond picking music, the assistant can answer questions about your listening habits. When did you first play that Fleetwood Mac track? What genres have you been obsessing over 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, but the company told TechCrunch AI it combines its own technology with models from multiple outside providers, chosen depending on the task.
Is your data safe to use with this?
Spotify has not published a dedicated privacy notice for the new feature yet. What that means in practice: 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, it is worth checking Spotify's privacy settings and seeing what data sharing you have already agreed to under your account.
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.
It is free to access if you already pay for Spotify Premium, which costs £11.99 a month in the UK and $11.99 in the US. There is no sign of this coming to free-tier users yet.
The rollout is happening now on mobile in the three launch markets.
