Spotify has a very cool feature called Community [2] where users can talk about what they want Spotify to do. The most upvoted ideas are things like "change my username" or "filter explicit songs." My personal wishlist is a "don't play this song again" button [3] and native Homepod support [4].
The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state, they just want comparatively basic features.
Spotify would do better to get back to basics on song suggestion instead of trying to guess emotional state - Pandora still finds similar songs by musical elements better than Spotify. A good example to try is to select a song that is out of genre for an artist - an acoustic version of a song that usually doesn't do acoustic for example. The suggestions for similar songs from Spotify all have to do with the artist genre not the actual song.
My Spotify Most Hated Bug is that I have to be careful what I name playlists now as it’ll completely fuck over the recommend songs if you’ve named it something it thinks it knows about
More widely, many, if not all, of any recommendation algorithm in any field (music and beyond) are not 'intelligent' (meaning smarter than the right human) in any way whatsoever; as noted, usually some tag sorting going on - and where items have been auto-tagged vs manual makes no difference to the quality; you're still dealing with a programmed personality when auto-tagged.
However, they do (appear to) 'work' (exhibit intelligence) when it's performed on a topic of which you know little; there they offer a helping hand.
That would be just one signal for the recommendation engine, given that you only named the playlist without any songs that probably weighed in quite heavily on the recommendations. Did it change after you added songs or kept suggesting metal songs?
Spotify has all of their resources focused on podcasts, because that's where they'll be able to become a real aggregator and start making Real Money.
It's a damn shame because the open nature of podcasts is one of the most appealing things about them. I get where they're coming from though.
If they weren't spending ungodly amounts of cash on podcasts (cough joe rogan) they could probably buy pandora (just guessing, not looking at any actual numbers) and replace their recommendation engine with theirs.
I don't understand this business model. How does taking podcasts (something people are used to getting for free with few or no ads) and breaking the currently open ecosystem there is around them benefit anyone, least of all Spotify themselves?
I assume they believe exclusive podcasts will gain them paying subscribers. Of course by fracturing the open ecosystem they may find themselves unable to acquire some podcasts, but given that they are a large player they are well positioned to out bid the competition.
These were quite eery the first time I heard them. I was listening to an episode of Conan O'Brien's podcast from early 2019 and in the middle was an ad (read by Conan) for enjoying Miller lite at home during the covid quarantine.
I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what the hell had just happened until I found a page promoting Spotify's dynamic ad insertion for podcasts.
I listen to about ~15 podcasts. All of them have maybe a single 1-2min plug at the beginning, and maybe another at the end. All of them are about 30min or more.
I'd definitely qualify the worst case of 28 out of 30 minutes being actual content to be "few or no ads".
I've given up even wanting extra features, I just want them to fix the glaring bugs they've had for years.
My current favourites:
- if you sort a playlist you're playing, then click the album art to find the currently playing song, it will skip to the position of the track in the _unsorted_ list
- playlists over a certain length just won't play via Spotify Connect. There's a couple of playlists I just can't play on my Sonos speakers.
- playing a daily mix hides the shuffle button, and yet it still uses the shuffle state you had selected previously. If you want to turn shuffle off you have to play something else, toggle shuffle, then play the daily mix again
I've tried reporting these. They made me jump through a thousand standard troubleshooting hoops despite them all happening on every device I own. Then a few days later they came back and said it was "working as intended". Mind blowing.
Yup, my only major gripe is with Spotify matching the volume from my desktop (application level) to my phone (system level) and vice versa. I've seen lots of reports of this "feature" being more of a bug and reporters being told to go through hoops. So many I've not bothered pursuing it myself as I'm sure it's hopeless.
or removing their best features. You used to be able to long press on a song and it would play the hook of the song. It was a great way to get the general feel of a playlist. They randomly removed it 3 or 4 years ago because supposedly no one used it
Agreed. I dont need Spotify to try to understand my mood, I actively dont want them to.
I DO need them to understand (or give me a manual way to tell them) which playist is for my 4yo and stop trying to play me their songs when I’ve selected a playlist for me. Drives me nuts.
While I understand it not being worth it to you/making sense (them not having their own device, presumably) yet for a 4yo, there's not much incentive for Spotify because in most cases like that they want to sell you a multi-account plan.
I'm always amazed how badly designed software is. To the point that anyone trying to use the damn thing could point out problems within 10 seconds. I was shopping for a replacement bathroom fan on home depot website. I just want to find one that will fit in the old hole. You would think I would be able to filter by the actual size of the box. But no, its not apparent at all what their listed measurements refer to. Just give me a drawing with the dimension of the box. Thats all. Better yet, take the fan out of the box and showing me some pictures with measurements. But nope. Every fan has different included information. And this is after a year of Corona. And everyone needing to shop online.
Can't rule out this hypothesis that hiding information might be driving sales more than it would save expenditures, e.g. fear stimulating compulsive buying.
> People may not realize the value of this new feature because they have not even imagined it.
Sure, but in the meantime, they do realize the value of the features they keep requesting.
The sad reality is: not many people are going to leave Spotify because they can't change their user name or filter explicit songs[0]; they're essentially captive. The company instead wants to focus on features that will attract new users. The service will remain as bad as it can possibly be without hemorrhaging users, because from the POV of a growth-oriented company, existing users are worthless and not worth paying attention to.
--
[0] - Though I'm pretty sure at least marking songs as explicit was a feature years ago, when I used Spotify. A regression?
Luckily it seems like they finally did that! I recently was able to log in without my Facebook account (although I’m not sure if it removed Facebook from the account or not, but I no longer need to login with Facebook to access Spotify)
I think Spotify envisions a speaker which always plays exactly the right music at all times, reflecting the current mood and anticipating what's next, like a film score. That would indeed be incredible if it worked.
I don't particularly care about the details. I want the mixes or radios or discovers to be interesting to me. I'll give them lots of information if it will help them get it right.
And here I am, thinking that Spotify will start to provide me suicide prevention advice if I start listening to extremely depressing songs. I know Twitter tried to do that to me.
The “value” spotify is optimizing for is for itself, not for the user. The greatest trick tech companies have pulled is convincing us that their metrics are our metrics, when they’re often independent or at odds with each other.
Ford was being honest. The degree to which anyone at the time had a car it was a sign of luxury or great expense. Ford made it cheap.
What the people wanted was to go from A to B faster. How they did was "via a horse". Logically "faster horse" is their solution (of which I'm certain there were varying qualities of horses, some of which you wouldn't want to trust your life with).
What Ford did was focus on a problem "transportation is slow" (and horses make a lot of manure).
The Model T
>prized for its low cost, durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance
This was 5 years after the first car (Model A) in 1903. Which was 7 years after the prototype in 1896.
1. Add support for Apple Silicon (run on my computer)
2. Update the Spotify app icon for macOS Big Sur (fit the theme of computer/life)
3. Please bring back the Hide this Song Option and I dont like this song/ artist (listening to this puts me in a mood I don't like, don't play it)
- This is arguably the same thing as "detect emotional state": "wrong mood do not want". Ignoring that data signal suggests misaligned incentives/goals. While I'm certain many songs share common emotions between people, the degree to which we react to an individual song or genre varies. I'm not sure how they'd hope to accurately tune an emotional scale while also refusing to block songs/artists.
4. Emotes and user reactions
- again: gather the data surrounding how a song makes you feel. The ability to gather and train on this data should be crucial, without it how could they capture users emotions? (I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just clear to me this is aligned with the patent)
5. Globe Learning
- a suggestion to visualize music globally by artist home country/state/city
I wouldn't consider "inquisitive" or "learning" an emotion, but perhaps it's a higher order grouper "what state is the listener in".
There's an emotional component to the process of learning and ignoring "confused", "curious" exploration of something foreign could lead to an better overall "fulfilled emotional state"
To rephrase your last sentence: People (including companies) may not realize the value of a new feature because it has been neither _implemented_ nor _measured_.
How about this very reasonable request to "Remove current Song from Playlist" [1]? Filed in 2012, status shows as "Not Right Now", has collected 1343 votes and counting... They're even worse than Atlassian.
I really hate Spotify for everything except their pretty complete library and reasonable pricing. Discovery, searching, UI, everything just plain sucks, I miss 8tracks.
Yeah, I gave up on my subscription after I couldn't figure out how to list all the songs by a given musician. It's a simple feature that's part of all the music software that I've used before: Winamp, iTunes, Amarok, Gnome Music. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sounds like they've got plenty of people to work on the shiny new things but nobody to maintain the boring stuff. It's a shame because there are loads of engineers out there who enjoy maintaining stuff over long periods of time and generally doing the boring stuff that makes customers happy. These engineers are really undervalued in companies like Spotify. I think the success of companies like Microsoft is due in a great deal to valuing engineers who do the boring stuff.
As a user, I agree that features which give users control and agency are preferable to increasingly opaque ML. But as business decisions go, this argument is terrible. The subset of users who bother to post new ideas to the community forum won't be large enough to affect Spotify's bottom line, and these users are almost certainly not representative of the average user (who probably doesn't realize the community feature exists).
Spotify isn't optimizing for placating the vocal minority of power users, they're trying to increase their paid subscription count. It would be great if we lived in a world where these were the same thing, but they clearly aren't.
Their way of placating the vocal minority is the Community portal, where those who are passionate enough to express ideas to improve Spotify (in a way that is useful for the users, and not necessarily for Spotify) are given a place to discuss their ideas and are promptly ignored.
Maybe because people who want this aren't their customers.
I've argued that recommendation system for music are near useless for years because they don't group music together by what I actually want to hear together, and that it needs to be more careful about interpreting my actions because what goes together varies by mood and purpose.
E.g. you can't just take genre,or artist, because the music I want before bed need to be slow, soothing and familiar. Transitions between tracks also need to be much less abrupt than other times of day.
Other times I want something new and surprising.
Or loud and upbeat.
Until they convince me they can do that they're not getting my money.
This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity into a cluster of data points to be used against us by marketing and political campaigns - this is just gasoline on the flames of Silicon Valley techno backlash.
People like Affevtiva running facial micro expression algorithms etc. What happens when all this data is complied by your friendly neighborhood Data Broker in the name of a "Better Customer Experience" with realtime FitBit heartrates/sleep quality from Google with Amazon applying tone of voice stress analytics with Apple Pay's recent purchase history on top of .........
I am writing this inside a Facebook VR headset with eyetracking hardware and can't be sure my 'gaze' is not something I have agreed to have monitored in some EULA.
If they get these neuro brain machine interfaces to the point they work - I can only imagine the outcome without any established boundaries.
And just how can this industry establish boundaries ? Who decides and who decides who decides ?
The 'redeeming' aspect of this is that it is doomed to fail.
The machine learning systems here are just 'automation by averages' -- they are incapable of measuring any variables which could actually estimate your emotion.
Emotions are 'conceptualized bodily states' that the brain adopts in order to atune our motivation/etc. to our environment.
Indeed it isn't clear there are any devices we can attach to computer to even take measurements. At best, something like a continuous webcam feed would improve accuracy a little from "almost coinflip", and only for quite extreme emotions.
The problem with these systems is precisely that we are fed 'averages'. NOT that they are 'capturing sentiment' (ad-tech propaganda to sell their apps and ads).
My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.
> My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.
This is definitely happening on a global scale already.
It doesn't matter if a movie is "good", if netflix decides to feed it to everyone it will become #1. It doesn't matter is a song is "good", if spotify decides it's the next hit it will become one. &c.
It's like TV or radio on steroids, everyone listen to the same thing, read the same articles, watch the same netflix shows. Anecdata: a lot of my friends started to play chess seemingly out of nowhere, I really didn't get it until I learned there was a new netflix show about chess that made the game hype again
Stuff like this will just have me on bandcamp exclusively. Spotify has been a terrible experience, but for the sake of my teenage son, we decided to get a family account. Spotify is too obsessed with telling me how to consume music, I don’t need an album shuffled by default, the artist picked the track listing for a reason. The way Spotify cues music is bizarre. Their user interfaces are confusing and clunky. For a platform trying to go all in on podcast it’s near impossible to know when new episodes are released (unless I’m missing something). I don’t need something to spy on my mood and suggest music, I’ve figured that out - Dub techno while working Ambient while reading HipHop when hanging with the homies and Slayer when I’m working in the garage!
> I don’t need an album shuffled by default, the artist picked the track listing for a reason
I don't get you. Isn't the shuffle button on or off based on the last time you changed it? If the shuffle is on, and you play an album, then you'll play it shuffled. I'd much rather that than Spotify trying to predict whether I want to play something shuffled or not, and auto-changing the button status.
>> I don’t need something to spy on my mood and suggest music, I’ve figured that out - Dub techno while working Ambient while reading HipHop when hanging with the homies and Slayer when I’m working in the garage!
Out of topic a bit but this reminds me of the famous dictum, attributed to Charles V (H.R.E.): I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to my Men, and German to my Horse.
That seems an extreme solution for playing the tracks as listed in an album (but a good rationale for Spotify to _not_ turn auto-shuffle on by default)
Honestly, I don't think this is a good idea. It opens one up for manipulation. You feel this way and Spotify will suggest you something that makes you feel rather that way.
It doesn't matter if it's one or more songs meant to support these feelings or counter them, I don't think this is a good for people in the long run. That's not even considering the fact that they want to basically spy on people.
My first thought was what accountability or required liability will there be? Laws are nowhere near caught up to be relevant or significant for the times, and so the answer is there will be no accountability, liability, understanding or responsibility for the impact of their algorithmic decisions; we know the experiment Facebook did with showing more negative or depressive posts had on people, yet nothing happened to them for this.
Unrelated to Spotify discussion, I remember quite a few years ago that there was research on algorithmically detected fatigue in human voice, the scope of the research was to implement a means of fatigue warning for airline pilots and ATC staff.
My point there is that there is absolutely intrinsic value in researching in this field, but it just seems to be rather misguided whenever companies suffer from a high VC valuation.
Me too. I've learned over time that I tend to gravitate towards music that resonates with my current emotional state. So sad music when I'm sad, energetic music when I'm energetic, etc. But I guess they know that phenomenon too.
Beepity-boop beep! Emotional state detected: Depressed!
Suggesting playlist:
1. Nine Inch Nails – Hurt
2. Michael Andrews – Mad World
3. Klaus Nomi – The Cold Song
4. Johnny Mandel – Suicide is Painless
Did You Know: This playlist has been brought to you by analyzing frillions of Spotify users with advanced AI and selecting the optimal songs matching any emotional state.
When in reality it'd be arguably best to direct them to MDMA-assisted therapy in therapeutic setting and/or invite them to a medically supervised recreational dance party with MDMA and listing a selection of songs that may be played X/Y/Z DJs; not sure any nation's health system is anywhere nearly understanding or accommodating enough yet to offer our facilitate this, especially due to indoctrination and regulatory capture, for-profit interests, etc.
Urgh all music recommendation engines are broken as soon as you go out of like the top 10 genres and big labels. Listening to folk music is basically “7 degrees of Beyonce”. Start with any English folk song, start the radio feature on Spotify, and it won’t be long until it swaps to Taylor Swift, and then the next step is Beyonce. It’s like they forget about where you started and only base each suggestion off the last track.
Anyone remember Songza or Grooveshark? That was so beautiful. Makes Spotify and Pandora look a fool. What Spotify or Google Music Apple Music should be doing is what Songza was doing. Time of day, weather, genre, what do you want to do? -> Go
Companies file patents all the time; they aren't typically indicative of strategic direction. Having a strong patent portfolio is important for defense (it's like carrying a huge knife down a dark alley) so companies horde them. Getting support for filing patents is also a side perk for employee retention since most people don't have the resources or desire to file patents on their own dime but they look good on your LinkedIn page.
Well, the company who owns the rights to that song you skipped certainly has a financial motive to figuring out if there's somehow they can get you listening to it again so they can collect more royalties from it - so they may be willing to pay X for that chance, times X by Y for the number of profit-driven rights owners and that likely adds up to a decent, new revenue stream; industrial complexes are dead, long live industrial complexes!
This is insanity. I'm glad I gave up on this streaming nonsense a while ago when I realized it made me listen to music the platform wants me to listen, instead of music I want to listen.
I find that streaming services push me to this weird loop that I never feel like I have to go out of my way to discover music, because it's always pushing me music the platform wants to promote.
Of course they're not literally preventing me from doing anything, after all I can just search for the music I want, but often times I would find myself hours into music I've never heard of because the platform decided to play it after what I chose to listen to was over.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just not the way I enjoy listening to music. For me the process of discovering a new album is part of the experience, and i missed doing it when it was so convenient for me not to.
You can disable that feature if you don’t like it. Personally, I like it especially when I have a short playlist but would like to continue playing music in a similar style.
I understand, but that's also part of the problem. Human beings will take the shortest path to "victory" even if they don't like it, and this is a situation that exemplifies it. I end up having a worse experience overall, but it's the path of least resistance so it ends up being the "superior" option.
I'm not proposing that Spotify should remove the feature entirely, it's just not the way I want to listen to music.
Thank you for sharing the article. This sounds like an incredible disregard for privacy. Heavens, what happened to curating your own music playlists?
Most companies aren’t able to even keep my email safe.
This is not the kind of information I would entrust to anyone, let alone a music playing company.
Reminder to check your email periodically on https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Scary? Hardly. Most of the time Spotify's recommended music is just other songs by my favorite artists that I've already listened to 100x, on their platform. If they can't predict what I will like outside of the artists/genres I already listen to, I doubt they can make any predictions based on infinitely more noisy data points.
They can't even differentiate artists with the same fucking name.
The problem is they're likely to catalog and sell this information to 3rd parties even though they're probably even getting your emotional state wrong.
> Stop believing that just because we can do something, we have an intrinsic right to do something.
Where you draw the line isn't agreed upon by any means, so someone somewhere will end up doing it. In fact, there's no doubt that every nuclear-capable government is doing top-secret neuroscience research with the intent of figuring out how the brain works and utilizing that to extract information and manipulate POW or political rivals. The little public newsworthy neuroscience work that's out there[0] is the portion being paid for by corporate interests which actually don't have too much to gain from it in the near future, at least until the tech gets cheap enough to be implanted in either a phone or a car.
Give people more rights, and enforce violations. It won't happen, because the sort of rights that we need would obviate a huge swath of the economy.
But put simply, I think that we need to make it highly illegal to use information asymmetry to take advantage of people at a large scale.
People need legal protection against the natural "just make it work already" instinct that makes us blindly accept TOS terms and follow dark patterns. It would be laughable to argue that a significant portion of users actually understands what they are agreeing to.
You, as a hacker, have a responsibility to your community, family, friends, to build an alternative platform for them.
If you refuse this responsibility, you are failing your own family and community, and leaving them to suffer all the consequences.
You can't realistically tell your family to quit Service X, no matter how fucking bad it is, unless you're willing to provide them with an alternative, hardware and all, including either a replicated experience or on-demand support.
If you can't build an alternative to Service X, you must start teaching yourself immediately until you are able to do it.
I'm just a messenger, don't blame me for the current reality.
> If you can't build an alternative to Service X, you must start teaching yourself immediately until you are able to do it.
How are you going to teach yourself to acquire music licensing agreements that still allow you to run a profitable service at scale?
Given the money at stake and the number of people who could technically build such a service, what makes you believe that the problem is a lack of willpower or know-how?
It's reassuring to find someone who shares this sentiment. I hope people are starting to see the high cost that convenient services inevitably incur. Now we simply need the tools for individuals and small groups to cheaply create this alt-software.
Smash all the computers? Unless you regulate very tightly what you can track about your users I don’t see any mechanism for companies to stop doing this kind of stuff as it is great business
Regulating covert access to the camera and microphone doesn't really strike me as "heavy regulation".
And before we smash all the computers, maybe we can start with something less drastic, like smashing publicly traded companies? I rarely see privately held "lifestyle businesses" getting into hot water over customer abuses.
The Luddites were right, and we tend to reject that conclusion today more because we have no idea what to do if it's true than because we really think it's false.
(The Luddites were also not blanket opposed to technology, just technology that for absolutely no good reason made their lives worse instead of better.)
Luddites were opposed to advances in the textile industry, like automated looms. This does not strike me as a technology that made life worse in the long run. Affordable access to decent quality clothing for most of the worlds population sounds like a win. Especially for women who were freed from
The responsibilities of manufacturing clothing for their families and could later pursue careers.
Luddites were opposed to advances in the textile industry that were taking their jobs. They were an early, imperfect attempt at forming a labor union.
Making textiles was a job that require a lot of investment (apprenticeship) in learning the necessary skills. Automated looms put a lot of skilled labor out of work, while concentrating wealth into the people that owned the automated looms, which only required much cheaper unskilled labor.
Luddites were not opposed to technology! They were opposed to businesses using new technologies to destroy their livelihood. If they had been included in sharing the benefits of the new technologies, the Luddite movement wouldn't exist.
> This does not strike me as a technology that made life worse in the long run.
The luddites would have agreed. From [1]:
>> As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
> Especially for women who were freed from The responsibilities of manufacturing clothing for their families and could later pursue careers.
WTF? Luddites were highly skilled artisans that were being forced to abandon their careers.
So, in your opinion, the world would be better off today if textiles were still manufactured by hand, by highly skilled artisans? I’m not necessarily a fan of Forever 21 throwaway fast fashion, but I like being able to buy a shirt without it costing me more than an hour of labor.
No. Luddites were not against technology! Quoting again from my previous [1]:
> the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines" ... “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods [...] and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
They simply wanted to be included in reaping the benefits of technology. The popular belief that misrepresents Luddites as anti-technology instead of fighting against abusive labor practices is a good example of anti-labor propaganda.
Textile mill workers were often harmed, say by byssinosis (“brown lung”) or by amputations of fingers and other body parts in machinery lacking appropriate safety guards, etc.
Ban adtech. Keep beating advertising and marketing industries with a regulatory stick, until the only thing allowed is a logo on company building, tradeshows, and publishing honest-to-god feature listings that would-be customers can voluntary search for and peruse at their leisure.
All these recent scary tech inventions? They are all driven by collecting data for targeting ads, fine-tuning marketing strategies, and manipulating people better. Let's go after the root cause.
The link returns a 500 Internal Server Error - maybe it was the HN hug of death, but this post doesn’t seem big enough yet for that? Either way, I hope to read this when its back online. Seems interesting, and also scary.
I read this on Pitchfork [1] couple of days ago, their source was Music Business Worldwide [2] and with a provided US patent: Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal [3]
Yet another automation that is not needed by the user. As a designer I get it - it is growth hacking. For some reason I think this will backfire, music is personal experience without clear emotional boundaries. Example: Current emotional state: Happy. Reason: Good memories with my girlfriend. Song: Hurt by NIN. If a song has emotional signature you cannot predict with certainty that it will be in unison with emotional state of the listener.
Link is dead for me. Does anyone know how this works? Is it: Spotify asks how I'm feeling, I click the frowny face, and then it recommends me some sad songs?
> Streaming music platform Spotify has won a patent enabling it to snoop on users’ speech and even background noise in order to gauge emotional state and location type to serve up the appropriate soundtrack. Not creepy at all!
> Spotify has received a patent that will allow it to use speech recognition and sound analysis to assess a user’s demographic attributes, determine their emotional state, and even glean insight into their location. The information will be used – hypothetically, at least – to pick the perfect song to play without requiring any conscious data input from the listener.
Straight out spying, basically. It's what people were warning about with Siri, Cortana or whatever it was called. And it was dismissed with "I don't care, I'm not doing anything illegal and I have nothing to hide".
As to what does that mean, whether the things described in the patent have actually been used or it isn't just a bunch of nonsense, I don't really know.
This is one of those features that is good marketing because it makes headlines about their product.
It doesn't have to actually work particularly well (beyond what you can get with a pretty obvious guess), and probably won't. But it captures the media's attention and the public's imagination, just to claim that you're doing this.
Maybe they should focus on their client apps instead. I havent seen a worse ux in such a widely used app probably ever. From the apple tv os app to the web app there are so many appalling decisions and missing basic features.
Privacy issues aside, this seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. "It sensed I was having a party and drove me to drink more" or "it sensed I was sad and led me to self harm" both seem like plausible cases.
it is more profitable to choose the right audio streaming software. Among the different choices available, spotify clone has been one of the most popular options in music industry. https://www.ncrypted.net/spotify-clone
A quick comparison of the WHOIS results for each and this verbatim copy of the article seems to suggest the "San Francisco Telegraph" is a thinly veiled extension of RT:
It isn't directly relevant to the subject of this article, but a search for this headline/copy shows it has permeated a lot of right-wing and other questionable sources of info, but appears nowhere else.
> 13. A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising: an emotion processor having one or more sequences of emotion processor instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to generate an output adapted to an emotion detected in a natural utterance;
Outrage now. In 2 years we'll have forgotten what it was like before every website in the world did this. In 5 years your toaster will have people personality and you will fucking hate it.
And that's the problem. I wouldn't even care about it, since theoretically "no one forces me to use it" (and I don't), but in 10 years there simply aren't going to be any toasters on the market that don't do this.
In Transmetropolitan, the protagonist's matter converter (his oven so to speak) has a drug addiction problem. Like Spider Jerusalem, I may have to move to the sticks.
Spotify has a very cool feature called Community [2] where users can talk about what they want Spotify to do. The most upvoted ideas are things like "change my username" or "filter explicit songs." My personal wishlist is a "don't play this song again" button [3] and native Homepod support [4].
The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state, they just want comparatively basic features.
1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342854806_Just_the_...
2: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas
3: https://tinyurl.com/y52qtavt
4: https://tinyurl.com/y3hlw6ky