Spotify to use Google’s AI to offer better recommendations: What it means for users – Times of India

Spotify has announced its decision to expand its partnership with Google Cloud. The popular music streaming platform is set to use the tech giant’s large language models (LLMs) to help identify a user’s listening patterns. With this technology, Spotify will be able to suggest tailor-made recommendations across podcasts and audiobooks for users.
AI-powered LLMs that power chatbots like OpeanAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are trained on a huge amount of data that helps them generate text and other content.Alphabet-ownedGoogle Cloud also includes multiple LLMs like PaLM 2, Codey, Imagen and Chirp. These models are trained specifically on text, codes, images, audio and video.
Spotify’s adoption of AI
Spotify has been an early adopter of the AI technology. The music streaming platform started using it for music recommendation algorithms almost a decade ago. The Swedish company is now planning to use LLMs to replicate that across its non-music content. This includes podcasts and audiobooks.
By increasing revenue-generating formats like podcasts and audiobooks, Spotify has been looking to increase its earnings. Earlier, the company promised high-margin returns from its major investment in podcasts and audiobooks.
In a statement to the news agency Reuters, Spotify’s chief product and technology officer, Gustav Söderström said: “The evolution of our technology has been matched by Google Cloud’s commitment to building the best possible platform for our products to run on and driving further innovation with the emerging capabilities of generative AI.”

With this expanded Google partnership, Spotify is also exploring ways to use LLMs to offer a safer listening experience by identifying potentially harmful content. The company will use Google Cloud’s LLMs (large language models) to analyse roughly 5 million podcasts and 350,000 audiobooks in its content library.
Spotify will also use Google Cloud AI to “augment” the metadata of these non-music content. A podcast or audiobook’s metadata includes information like the title, the name of the host or author, show notes and other details. This metadata appears in the search results of podcast apps like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Earlier, Spotify rolled out an AI tool for songs called AI DJ. This feature uses OpenAI’s generative AI tools to create custom playlists.