add xavier post

brainsteam/content/posts/2023/06/17-xavier-dj/index.md

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+---
+title: "Xavier the Spotify AI DJ"
+date: 2023-05-23T21:13:45+01:00
+description: a brief update - I've been AWOL for a bit.
+url: /2023/5/23/an-irl-update
+type: post
+mp-syndicate-to:
+- https://brid.gy/publish/mastodon
+resources:
+ - name: feature
+   src: images/dj.png
+tags:
+  - personal
+---
+
+
+{{<figure src="images/dj.jpg" caption="An image of a robot DJ at a mixing desk generated by Stable Diffusion">}}
+
+
+Spotify recently joined the AI hype by introducing a new AI DJ to their app. I was initially deeply sceptical and cynical and started muttering about cancelling my subscription and just going back to using my local library and Plex. However, I thought I'd give it a go. So far I've found it to be... not terrible.
+
+## The Good
+
+- The text-to-speech is pretty nice. Spotify hired an actual human, [Xavier Jernigan](https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/21/xaviar-x-jernigan-spotify-dj-ai/) to provide the training data for the voice model and it feels like it was probably a worthwhile investment. Human Xavier's voice is perfect for DJing and much less jarring than I imagine the default Siri or Google voice would be.
+- It's kind of weirdly nice having a 'DJ' pop up occasionally between songs and give some facts about what I'm listening to. Xavier sometimes gives little factoids about artists and albums that he's introducing.
+- I quite like the fact that he changes up the set every 5-or-so songs. Previously I just had a giant playlist that I share with my wife with everything we both like on it and we just played that on shuffle so it's kind of fun to have a few minutes devoted to a certain 'vibe' or artist without having to manually make that happen.
+- Sometimes Xavier plays new songs, so it's quite nice from a discovery angle - I've found a few songs that I'd not heard before that have gone onto my giant list of songs including [Fairlies by Grian Chatten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU79fE_zelU) and [Nothing Matters by The Last Dinner Party](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pETz4IMmeDU).
+
+
+## The bad and ugly
+
+- If you listen to Xavier for a few days in a row, it does start to repeat stuff quite a lot. Not necessarily a problem if the repeated material is stuff you like but a little jarring if prefixed with "here are some new songs you might not have heard before" - yes actually, you played them for me yesterday!
+- Genre names seem to be a bit weird, I assume that's actually a symptom of how Spotify tags up its music rather than a problem with the AI but again, it's a little jarring when Xavier says "Now it's time for some indie hits", your mind jumps to the mid-00s and prepares for Arctic Monkeys or Pigeon Detectives and you actually get a Blur song (I love Blur by the way, but they are Britpop, not indie).
+- Sometimes Xavier seems to play 5 songs by an artist I can't stand. I'm not quite sure why that might be but at least you can skip through the set.
+- There seem to be a few places where Xavier doesn't work yet including Spotify's desktop app and if you stream via Alexa. I imagine they'll fix that. You can still listen to "AI DJ" playlists over Alexa but you just don't hear the voice-overs and thus don't have any context for each set.
+
+
+## Conclusion
+
+I've quite enjoyed experimenting with Xavier. I hope that the functionality improves and that the repetitive behaviour can be fixed. I'll keep listening to Xavier until I get to the point that the suggestions irritate me a bit too much.
+
+Also as a geek, I'm also interested in whether an open/alternative version could be cobbled together using open metadata from places like [MusicBrainz](https://musicbrainz.org/) and [Last.fm](https://www.last.fm/home) and even [libre.fm](https://libre.fm/) scrobbles, a text to speech engine, a free Llama-like LLM and a sprinkling of data science to cluster similar songs and artists.