Spotify Wrapped now includes an AI-generated podcast that analyzes your listening habits

The countdown is over: Spotify Wrapped 2024 is here. Finally, after a long year of exploring and listening, platform users can now check out the songs and podcasts What they liked the most during the year. In addition to sharing them with everyone thanks to the fun graphics prepared specifically for social networks.

We are more than ready to see the stories of our friends’ Instagram pages full of summaries of artists and their most listened to songs. Nevertheless, This 2024 the striking visual effects will be accompanied by a new audio plugin created with AI. Starting today, you can listen to your annual report with DJ Wrapped, a way to podcast personalized with artificial intelligence in which two artificial presenters enthusiastically comment on your musical tastes.

How to watch Wrapped 2024?

It’s as easy as tapping the Wrapped icon on the main app screen. Spotify added new features: the “Your musical evolution” tab will have a story of data that tells the different phases you have gone through this year and that gives life to the personalized playlist. Added to this is the option of “Your Best Artist Reimagined”, which allows you to know which singer or band you appreciated the most during 2024.

Since 2023, Spotify has added clips from your artists and podcasters favorites: personalized short messages, recorded directly from your favorite singers and creators. The platform is committed to the mission of you sharing all your musical tastes on your official accounts, including TikTok, and other messaging applications with a simple tap on the “Share” element.

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A mix of the artificial with the genuine

AI is not a foreign topic to Spotify. In 2023, the platform introduced DJ, a resource that emulates the work of a radio host and offers the user a varied selection of songs, genres and artists based on their tastes, while commenting on data and information around the proposed content. . Your new podcast recap works with Google’s NotebookLM; If you’ve used the tool to generate audio about a topic you’re researching, then Wrapped’s two artificial voices will sound familiar.

The voices, which Spotify refers to as “AI hosts,” will engage in a brief conversation about you and your listening patterns in 2024. The beta version, accompanied by the English voice “DJ X”, is now available in the US, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Sweden; and with “DJ Livi” for Mexico. Like the visuals, DJ Wrapped comments can be easily shared on social networks.

He podcast It’s totally personalized: both presenters call you by your name and speak in the second person. In addition to providing you with specific data, such as your favorite artist and the total number of minutes you have listened to them; AI casters will analyze the data Spotify has collected about you. They will flatter you: they told me that I am “a creator of tastes” and that “he was happy to hear from me, so much so that he had an artificial smile from ear to ear.” DJ Livi expressed curiosity about my life and my “very diverse” musical taste, asking me what I was doing on March 21, the day I listened to more minutes of music than any other day in 2024. Strange? Yes, but I appreciate the gesture.

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An early “Christmas gift”

This improved version of Wrapped comes at a time when users are expressing concerns about Big Tech companies’ surveillance of their behavior and rampant data collection. Spotify has come under fire for presenting its accurate tracking of user activity as a “cozy Christmas gift” and easy to share. Listeners have also been slow to accept the podcasts generated by AI, which often feature saccharine virtual presenters who sound terrifying in their attempts to sound human.

The version podcast Spotify’s custom annual report represents the company’s commitment to establishing itself as the leading destination for the long-form audio medium. The company assures that since 2019, when the platform added podcasts to your library streaming500 million people have listened to a podcast on Spotify. And over the past year, the music giant has continued to build out its music-related offerings. podcasts by giving users the ability to comment below episodes, and by providing tools for users to podcasters Track and grow your audience.

This Wrapped feature will probably be many users’ introduction to podcast generated by AI, which is not as common as other manifestations of generative artificial intelligence. With this release, those users will hear for the first time the ability of AI-generated dialogue to sound surprisingly similar to a conversation between humans. However, it can also be annoying for the growing list of creators of podcasts from Spotify who may see the promotion of Wrapped’s AI presenters as a conflict.

It’s no coincidence that Spotify Wrapped arrives a day after Apple Music’s Replay report. While Apple Music users will get much of the same data about their listening habits as Spotify users, they won’t have a team of two presenters. podcasts driven by artificial intelligence that explain everything to you. Maybe next year.

Additional information from Chiara Crescenzi.

Article originally published in WIRED. Adapted by Alondra Flores.