Spotify is testing an AI chatbot inside its mobile app for Premium subscribers, putting conversational search and playback controls directly into the service people already use to listen. The company calls the feature “Talk to Spotify,” according to Spotify’s announcement.
The feature appears in the Home screen and the Now Playing view of Spotify’s mobile app. Users can enter requests in a text box, the now-standard rectangle that has followed chatbots into every corner of software, or tap a microphone icon and speak instead.
Spotify says the chatbot is meant to help people play and explore music, audiobooks and podcasts. That makes it broader than a music-only recommendation widget. In practice, Spotify is putting a general media request layer over several parts of its catalog, rather than asking users to switch between search, playlists and show pages by hand.
The company is limiting the experiment to Premium subscribers. Spotify’s announcement describes the feature as an experiment, so its wider availability, final behavior and long-term placement in the app are not settled from the information the company has disclosed.
How the feature works
Talk to Spotify is a chatbot interface, not a separate app. Spotify places it inside existing app surfaces: Home, where users typically start browsing, and Now Playing, where they are already listening. The input method is either text or voice, which means the same feature can behave like a search bar, a voice assistant or a recommendation prompt depending on how a user addresses it.
Spotify says the bot can handle conversational requests around audio content. The company also says it can reference a user’s playlists, which would let it work from a listener’s own library rather than only from generic catalog metadata. That is the practical difference between a chatbot that says “try jazz” and one that can respond to the way someone has already organized their listening.
Spotify follows Amazon into AI audio assistants
Spotify is not the first major streaming service to add this kind of interface. Amazon Music introduced a similar feature last year by integrating Alexa Plus into its music service, according to The Verge.
The overlap is obvious: streaming companies want users to ask for media in normal language instead of tapping through menus. Spotify’s version, as described by the company, extends that idea across music, audiobooks and podcasts while tying the experience to parts of the user’s Spotify account such as playlists.
For now, Talk to Spotify is another AI layer inside an app that already has search, recommendations and voice input. The useful test is whether Premium subscribers get better results faster, or whether Spotify has added one more box asking users to talk to a machine before it plays a song.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge AI.
