Music streaming service Spotify has reportedly filed a patent for new personality tracking technology that analyzes a user’s emotional state and suggests music based on it. The patent, titled “Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal,” details constantly monitoring “speech content and background noise” to provide song suggestions. They admit they've already been doing it for years.
Music Business Worldwide reports that in October 2020, Spotify filed a patent for personality tracking technology that could determine a user’s emotional state in order to suggest the perfect song for them to listen to.
The filing explained that behavioral variables such as a user’s mood, their favorite genre of music, or their demographic could all “correspond to different personality traits of a user.” Spotify suggested that this could be used to promote personalized content to users based on the personality traits it detected.
Now a new U.S. Spotify patent shows that the company wants to use the technology to analyze users even further by using speech recognition to determine their “emotional state, gender, age, or accent.” These attributes can then be used to recommend content.
The new patent is titled “Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal” and was filed in February 2018 and granted on January 12, 2021. The patent can be read in full here.
According to the filing, the 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.”
Spotify states that “it is common for a media streaming application to include features that provide personalized media recommendations to a user.”
Read more at Music Business Worldwide here.
