Spotify hints at a more chatty voice AI interface in the future

Spotify has experimented with various voice interfaces in the past, and more recently, added an AI DJ that introduces tunes the company thinks you’ll like and lets you make your own requests. Now, Spotify is teasing that generative AI advances may pave the way for an even more conversational interface with the streaming service in the future, according to comments made during Spotify’s second-quarter earnings call with investors on Tuesday.

Asked about how AI was affecting its business, Spotify Chief Product and Technology Officer Gustav Söderström noted that consumers today are able to talk to Spotify in plain English to request music, allowing the company to associate which phrases connect with which songs.

“You can think of it as us getting a new dataset,” he said. “Spotify’s got this unique dataset from all of its playlists, which was really song-to-song — like which song goes well with another song, kind of the Amazon ‘people who bought this also bought that,’” he said. Meanwhile, the voice interface is delivering new insights to the company.

“And that’s completely new to us, and it’s a very, very valuable dataset that we are collecting very quickly,” he added.

As a result, the exec says we can expect Spotify’s consumer experiences to get “much more interactive.”

“You can already write to Spotify, talk to Spotify. You’re just going to see that expand,” Söderström said.

Plus, AI technology would allow Spotify to do more than just predict what someone might want to listen to, whether music, podcasts, or audiobooks, as it does today. Instead of only making predictions, it would be able to “reason” over the user’s listening history and what they said to the AI DJ. The reference to reasoning suggests that Spotify is looking toward AI reasoning models that can perform more complex tasks across multiple steps.

The voice data in question comes from Spotify’s AI DJ feature. In May 2025, Spotify introduced a way for Premium subscribers to make voice requests to the English-language AI DJ by pressing a button in the app. This lets users change the music, the genre, or the mood of a playlist using a voice command.

Consumer features aren’t the only way Spotify is leveraging AI. During the call, the exec also mentioned that Spotify is using generative AI internally to more rapidly prototype products and create efficiencies in other areas of its business, like finance.

In the quarter, Spotify hit 276 million paying subscribers, up 12% year-over-year, and 696 million monthly active users, but swung to a loss after missing revenue targets. The stock fell 10% on weak guidance and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s comments about his unhappiness with the company’s ads business.