Though the voice makes quips or shares tidbits about bands you’re listening to, the interruptions never feel warm or personable. However, it does not sound quite natural enough. “Take a journey through a little bit of jazz today,” X may invite you.
But otherwise it comes across as a cool, calm voice guiding you through your music.
Occasionally it stumbles or sounds slightly stilted when saying the name of an artist or song. AI voices have a tendency to divebomb straight into the uncanny valley, with their strange intonations and halting, robotic cadences. The generated audio sounds fantastic, especially for a digital simulacrum. The voice is modeled on the melodious rumble of Xavier “X” Jernigan, Spotify’s head of cultural partnerships. The robot DJ breaks into the stream between songs to tell you what you’re listening to. The feature is the result of Spotify’s acquisition last year of the AI voice service Sonantic. It is available as a beta option on the Spotify mobile app, though only for people who pay for Spotify Premium. The music streaming service is rolling out a new AI DJ service starting this week. Spotify, king of the algorithmic playlist, is eager to do just that. They shove them into the spotlight to convince people the AIs are super chill, actually, and can hang with us meatsacks. Partly to show off and try to cash in on the current AI gold rush, but also, I think, in an effort to humanize their algorithms. They want to bring them to the forefront. The recent rise of generative AI has made some companies no longer content to just let their algorithms simmer in the background. In the background, an artificial intelligence decides what should come next. Choose a genre or mood and groove without interruption until the end of time. (Thanks Dad!) The radio DJ is a dinosaur, buried and compressed and repurposed to fuel endless algorithmically generated streaming playlists. We all have Spotify accounts, or mooch off someone else’s. Of course, nobody listens to the radio anymore. They can be annoying, sure, but they’re also comforting, because they’re friendly and familiar humans. Their little interruptions, popping into your life at unexpected and often inopportune times, remind you they’re there. No matter how smooth their voice is, they still break in between songs-or worse, talk over them. Even the very best radio DJ can be annoying.
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