Monitoring Users’ Speech

Pitchfork reports Spotify now has a patent to use recordings of our speech and background noise to make music recommendations.

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.