advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

Spotify is adding a voice search feature and we have no idea why

Digital assistants are rather nifty and we make use of them more than we’d care to admit here in the Hypertext office. Sure, you could make a note of something important to remember or you could simply say “Hey Google (or Hey Siri) remind me to get milk at 5pm” and your reminder is set.

Something we use our Google Assistant for very often is to play music, which makes reports from TechCrunch and GSM Arena, a bit odd.

According to those outlets, Spotify is introducing a hands-free wake word feature that lets you play music and podcasts using voice commands.

Users are receiving a notification prompting them to active the voice search functionality according to GSM Arena. Upon tapping the notification users are walked through how to activate the feature. As an aside, you can seemingly toggle this feature on and off at will and you might want to acquaint yourself with how to do that.

The reason we say that is because as GSM Arena points out, the app will constantly be listening for the ‘Hey Spotify’  wake-word. Spotify says it only holds recordings and transcriptions of searches performed with the wake-word and when tapping the voice search button. Let’s hope that is the case and we don’t hear about Spotify employees listening in on users.

As TechCrunch reports, this feature was spotted back in 2019 with a device called Car Thing. Car Thing was meant to be a way for Spotify Premium subscribers to control the app with voice commands. Whether the launch of this feature on Android and iOS is a sign that Car Thing may still be a play is unclear.

We still don’t quite understand why anybody would use Spotify voice search if they aren’t already using something like Siri or Google Assistant. Both of those assistants can play music from Spotify so the functionality within Spotify just seems odd.

With that having been said we will be on the lookout for this update because what good is living in the future if you don’t use things like voice search to impress your friends.

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement