New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users' Speech To Recommend Music (pitchfork.com) 39
Spotify has been granted a patent with technology that aims to use recordings of users' speech and background noise to determine what kind of music to curate and recommend to them. The company filed for the patent in 2018; it was approved on January 12, 2021. From a report: The patent outlines potential uses of technology that involves the extraction of "intonation, stress, rhythm, and the likes of units of speech" from the user's voice. The tech could also use speech recognition to identify metadata points such as emotional state, gender, age, accent, and even environment -- i.e., whether someone is alone, or with other people -- based on audio recording.
Ummm.... (Score:2)
I think I see a fatal flaw in their plan: The background "noise" will be ... guess what? Spotify!
Re: (Score:3)
Its called Acoustic Echo Cancellation and it works fine.
https://wiki.analog.com/resour... [analog.com]
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How the fuck are they going to get my speech, and background noise?
Are they going to force me to turn my microphones on for them, or do it behind my back?
Colour me Spotify canceled the day they access my microphones on any of my devices.
I love the service for music, I'll pay for that, but I refuse to allow them to listen back to ME.
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Not arguing, I won't install it now. Just sayin, subtracting audio out from audio in has been around for a long time - think speaker phones. I'm with you, and audio player should be a player and not a recorder too.
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I guess my main concern was, how is/would Spotify gain access to my microphone(s) in the first place?
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Are they going to force me to turn my microphones on for them, or do it behind my back?
Which ever you prefer.
Re: Ummm.... (Score:2)
How long before the lawsuit about blatant racism? Just because I speak with an inner city accent does not mean I automatically listen to gangsta rap you racist piece of shit! Or something along those lines.
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What if you curse a lot?
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What if you're scottish?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuFcIRlwdc
oh well (Score:2)
I was finally considering using Spotify, so much for that. I'm so tired of the invasive spying in the name of advertising. Fuck these assholes.
Re: oh well (Score:3)
Wake me up when I get my own personal AI that isnt in the cloud being shared with everyone else. Maybe then Iâ(TM)ll let it do stuff. After I made it paranoid and only loyal to me. You know.. like the stephen king car Christine. Lol
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I think you misremember Christine.. she required her owners to be faithful to only her..and ate/crunched them anyway.
Note to self: (Score:2)
Spot ify behaviour (Score:5, Interesting)
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It does not track me, it has multiple channels, uses no data. You can even get devices that will allow you to use it for less than $10. I can even listen to the same channel at home, my car, and at work, with or without headphones on. And none of that reduces my battery life on my phone.
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I too have this thing called radio. But it's full of "Cancon" so it just sucks. I guess I'll be going back to mp3s at some point.
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Just curious, is there a way to flag or ban this user (George Lootas)? It's a marketing bot (check the posting history).
obligatory (Score:2)
Time to f' with it? (Score:2)
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Even though I grew up in the midwest, I can, if I think about it a bit, do a terrific long-drawn southern drawl. I can also do a hasty big nothern city speed-speech. I'd switch back and forth between those every hour or two and see how long before my device exploded.
privacy? What privacy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I get it now! The way you solve the privacy issue, or continuously abusing our rights is to continuously abuse our rights. Just keep pounding away at it to numb the concern. As long as it's couched in technological innovation, of course.
Re: privacy? What privacy? (Score:2)
Winner winner, chicken dinner.
The next logical step, camera monitoring the user (Score:3, Insightful)
Recommending rap music to stutterers ... (Score:2)
I'm quite sure they are not interested in that. (Score:2)
If they would then they would have figured out that I never listen to German music but they still promote it to me. Just because of either my credit card or IP address. So making recommendations based on listening habit is already too difficult for them, why in the world would they want to listen to what I say, my gender, age and emotional state. Heck, why not output an ultrasonic side-stream so that other Spotify users get that song recommended ASAP.
Re: I'm quite sure they are not interested in that (Score:2)
Surely you were wanting to listen to Scooters Lass Uns Tanzen
Wiretapping is a felony (Score:1)
Here's hoping all these creepy stalker motherfuckers up in everyone's business go to jail where they belong.
Ampache (Score:2)
Prior Art? (Score:2)
Surely we nerds can find another app that makes suggestions based upon "recordings of users' speech and background noise" that already exists...[looks at Google app on phone]
What’s Good For The Goose... (Score:2)
Yet now we learn that Spotify reckon that they can scan *speech* - which we might reasonably infer to be harder than typed-in text - for the purpose of making more sales to users.
It’s starting to sound like this sort
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I think it's likely they are already doing something like that for people conspiring to commit violence in an explicit way. Explicit enough that the chat logs, on their own, would support a criminal conviction. But since the sixth, now even the dumbest ones are going to use a channel outside of Gmail and Facebook for that end of things.
That leaves us with the "wildfire memes" you mentioned, which aren't enough to put someone in jail, but are enough to induce people into alternate realities and encourage vio
it would be neat if - (Score:2)
it could examine the acoustics of a space, like if you were at an airport - and recommend Brian Eno's "Music for Airports", which he engineered to fit. But it's probably about grabbing personal data.
Would never use it...seems legit (Score:2)
While I don't think I would ever want this, it sounds like a marketable feature that wouldn't be kept secret. A virtual DJ. It would actually be useful to have the music playing at a party follow the mood of the party.
Primus Sucks (Score:2)
Right... (Score:1)
Right, depending on your speech, you may have face the music. No thanks.
Just give us music ffs. (Score:1)