At any waking moment, there is an army of virtual assistants waiting to serve us. Now you can add Spotify to that list with news that the music streaming platform is rolling out its own voice assistant.
‘Hey Spotify’
As tested by The Verge and 9to5 Mac, Spotify has started to implement its own native voice assistant.
All you have to do is open the app and speak the words “Hey Spotify” to trigger the assistant. You can then tell it to play a song, playlist, podcast or you can control skip, play and pause functions.
In terms of interesting commands, The Verge found that asking Spotify to “play something I like” would bring up a random Daily Mix playlist, which is personalised for users from Spotify’s algorithm.
The catch here is that you need to have the Spotify app physically open on your device for the voice commands to work. For that reason, you may find using your device’s own assistant, like Siri, Alexa or Google, more functional than Spotify’s for now.
How to access Spotify’s virtual assistant
The Spotify voice assistant appears to be rolling out progressively on Android and iOS devices as of now.
You’ll know when “Hey Spotify” is available for you thanks to an onscreen prompt on your device. The notification should ask for Spotify to access your microphone. Once enabled the app will run through some instructions on how its new voice assistant works.
If a prompt doesn’t appear you might be able to toggle the feature manually by going to Spotify’s settings > Voice interactions > enable “Hey Spotify”.
If you can’t see this option in your settings then it hasn’t rolled out to your device yet. In future, that’s where you’ll find it. We haven’t seen it pop up just yet in Australia but hopefully an upgrade will be made available shortly.
Rumours that Spotify has been developing more voice-control functions have been abundant for a while now. While this feature is stuck within the app right now it’s possible this is a precursor for Spotify developing its own dedicated assistant hardware in the future.