Spotify Wrapped is finally here, giving subscribers a personalized look back at their year in music. This year, Spotify has partnered with Google’s NotebookLM to offer a unique AI-generated podcast summarizing your listening habits. While the concept is innovative and entertaining, the AI hosts struggle with pronunciations, particularly with non-English names and titles.
This AI-driven podcast begins like any typical music discussion. The hosts initially highlight your longest listening day, offering sometimes overly simplistic speculations about the reasons behind extended listening sessions. In my case, the AI attributed a day filled with melancholic music to a potential road trip, completely missing the mark (it was a rather emotional day). While this might seem like a minor misstep, it highlights the AI’s limitations in understanding nuanced contexts.
The real pronunciation challenges arise when the AI delves into your top artists and songs. For example, the Dutch artist Joost Klein (pronounced “Yost”) was rendered as “juiced,” and the pronunciation of his song “Wachtmuziek” was far from the correct Dutch articulation. While a human host might also stumble over unfamiliar names, the AI’s consistent mispronunciations become noticeable and detract from the overall experience.
The issues extend beyond Dutch. The AI also struggles with Spanish, particularly with Latin music artists like Bad Bunny and the genre itself, “reggaeton.” The mangled pronunciation underscores a key challenge for AI: accurately capturing the nuances of different languages. Given that music is often categorized by language, it seems like an area ripe for improvement in AI pronunciation algorithms. While Google acknowledges the AI’s pronunciation shortcomings, it somewhat diminishes the “magic” of the technology.
The inaccuracies raise questions about the current capabilities of AI. Shouldn’t an AI, with access to vast datasets, be able to learn and apply correct pronunciations based on the language of the music? This seems like a logical next step in the development of AI text-to-speech technology.
Despite the pronunciation hiccups, the Spotify Wrapped AI podcast is a fun and engaging novelty. It offers a personalized recap of your listening habits and provides some amusing, albeit occasionally awkward, commentary. The podcast is available for a limited time to Free and Premium Spotify users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Sweden.
