Spotify Rolls Out AI DJ
Spotify brings their reccomendation engine to life with a new AI-driven features.
Created on February 24|Last edited on February 24
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Spotify Innovates Again
Spotify recently announced the launch of their new “AI DJ” feature, which utilizes your Spotify library along with proprietary AI software to replicate a real DJ.
The feature will leverage a vast database of listening preferences from users to play favorable songs, and will be complimentary to the existing recommendation engine experience. Spotify says they leverage OpenAI’s generative AI technology along with their team of dedicated music editors to provide users with insightful facts about music, artists, and genres that users are are currently listening to.
As for the DJ voice itself, Spotify is utilizing AI tech from Sonantic, which Spotify purchased for ~95 million in June of last year [1]. Sonantic is well known for its realistic voice replicating technologies utilized in the Top Gun Maverick Movie, which later led to their acquisition [2].
Spotify partnered with their own Head of Cultural Partnerships, Xavier “X” Jernigan as the first voice for the system, and Spotify says they are looking to continue to add new voices for their AI DJ system, utilizing the voice replication tech developed by Sonantic.
Origin of Sonantic
What's unique about Sonantic is not just their ability to generate realistic voices, but also their ability to mimic a specific individuals voice and capture all the emotions of the human voice.
Looking back on Sonantic, the CTO and co-founder John Flynn described the company’s goal was to capture “deep emotion” using deep learning [3]. It’s this emotion that stood out as the solution to creating a realistic DJ for Spotifty.
Who will replace Sonantic?
Sonantic may be just the first of many realistic generative AI startups to go mainstream, as the technology itself has deep implications in many other domains, like film, television broadcasting, gaming, and voice assistants.
Now that Spotify owns Sonantic, its difficult to say whether the company will continue to roll out new products outside of the Spotify core product lineup, or if new companies will step in and continue to develop realistic AI voices for other applications. It seems only natural that with the advent of hyper-realistic chat bots like ChatGPT, high quality generative voice AI will go mainstream as well, and the two technologies will unite to create hyper-realistic human voice bots.
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