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 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.
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 and Last.fm and even 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.