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Spotify has spent years trying to predict what you want to hear next. Its latest idea is to let you explain it yourself.
The company announced on July 14 that it’s rolling out a conversational AI feature that lets users type or speak to Spotify from inside the mobile app. Eligible Premium subscribers can ask for something to play, listen for a moment, and then keep adjusting the selection through follow-up requests instead of starting over every time the mood changes.
You could begin by asking Spotify to play artists you have never heard before, then tell it to add some Taylor Swift. From there, you could narrow the selection to her newer music, ask for something more upbeat, or take the playlist in another direction entirely. The assistant can also handle some of the smaller tasks that usually require tapping around the app, including saving songs, adding tracks to the queue, and following artists.
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The beta is gradually rolling out in English to Premium users ages 18 and older in the United States, Ireland, and Sweden through Spotify’s iOS and Android apps. It will appear across the Home and Now Playing screens, where users can either press the microphone button or type their requests.
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Spotify is also letting users ask the chatbot questions about whatever they are currently hearing. From the Now Playing screen, listeners can ask when an album came out, what genre a song belongs to, or what inspired a particular project.
The same system works with podcasts and audiobooks. A listener could ask what other books an author has written or which other podcasts have featured a particular guest, making it possible to satisfy a passing curiosity without leaving Spotify and opening a separate app. Consider it one less tab to lose track of.
How reliably the assistant will answer those questions remains to be seen.
Spotify is calling the release a beta and has acknowledged that its responses will not always be correct. Don’t forget: Even for the best AI models, accuracy and hallucinations are a stubborn problem. The new Spotify AI assistant is programmed using a combination of Spotify’s own AI technology and models from several providers, depending on which system is best suited to a particular request.
According to one user, the feature becomes more…intimate when users stop asking about Spotify’s catalog and start asking about themselves.
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Because Spotify already tracks users’ playlists, favorite artists, repeat listens, and streaming histories, the assistant can answer questions about how their taste has changed over time, including when they first played a song, which genres they prefer, or how often they have streamed a particular artist.
Spotify has long used that data for products like Discover Weekly, daylist, and Wrapped. The new assistant makes some of it available on demand, rather than waiting for the platform to package those habits into an end-of-year playlist or graphic that inevitably ends up on Instagram.
This is part of Spotify’s embrace of artificial intelligence
Spotify has already been weaving AI into the listening experience. Its AI DJ picks songs and talks between tracks, while its prompt-based playlist tool lets users create a mix simply by describing the mood they want. Listeners can also connect Spotify to ChatGPT and ask for personalized music and podcast recommendations there.
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Spotify laid out a much broader version of that AI strategy at its investor event on May 26, when executives described what they called the “era of Generation.” Co-CEO Gustav Söderström said the company wanted the listening experience to be shaped in real-time around each user’s taste, context, and intentions, rather than limited to choosing from a fixed catalog.
One of the products announced at the event was Personal Podcasts, an upcoming feature that will generate private audio programs from a user’s prompts. Someone could ask Spotify for a daily update about their city that also includes concerts from artists they follow, while another listener might request a five-minute explanation of economics.
The company also announced Studio by Spotify Labs, a desktop app that can generate personalized audio using a person’s Spotify activity and, with permission, information from their calendar, inbox, notes, and other documents.
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This evolving approach gets even more complicated when we shift from AI organizing music to AI actually creating music itself.
In May, Spotify and Universal Music Group also announced licensing agreements for a generative AI tool that will let fans make covers and remixes using songs from participating artists and songwriters. Participating artists and songwriters will receive a share of the money generated by those creations, with co-CEO Alex Norström describing the project as being built around “consent, credit, and compensation,” rather than proliferating unregulated AI slop.
Spotify has separately announced that it is working with Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, and Believe on other products it describes as artist-first AI tools.
The music industry is already past the point of treating AI-generated music as a distant possibility. Text-to-music tools can now produce full songs from a prompt, AI tracks are making their way onto streaming services and music charts, and increasingly convincing voice clones have made it easier to imitate recognizable artists.
Many in the music industry aren’t happy about it. Back in June 2024, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records sued the companies behind Suno and Udio, alleging that the text-to-music services copied copyrighted recordings without permission to train their models. Since then, some of those disputes have turned into business deals: Universal settled its case against Udio in October 2025 and agreed to work on a licensed AI music platform, while Warner settled with Suno the following month and announced a partnership based on artists choosing whether their names, voices, likenesses, and compositions can be used.
Some AI music tools exist in a legal gray area for now, as litigation is ongoing. In May 2026, Universal and Sony asked to add over 61,000 recordings to their continuing case against Suno, saying material obtained through discovery showed that millions of their copyrighted tracks had been used in its training data.
Taken together, Spotify’s recent moves suggest the company wants AI to do more than recommend the next song. Instead, it wants the technology to help users understand music, shape it, and eventually create it. Whether artists and listeners will embrace that future is an open question.
Click here to read more >> https://mashable.com/life/spotify-ai-chatbot-listening-history