Spotify Voice

    This is just gonna be a rant. I'm not being a character or trying to be satirical, this is genuine frustration. Now, let's talk about why I hate Spotify Voice. Spotify Voice is the implemented voice control for the mobile app for premium users. Why do you think people use voice controls for things like this? Situations when it's inconvenient to use their hands or they just can't. For me, I like to listen to music when I'm driving and showering, two situations where it's very inconvenient for me to pick up my phone to skip a song or change the music, because I'd either have to take my eyes off the road and hands off the wheel when driving or step out of the shower and dry off my whole arm so water doesn't drip onto my phone. The point is, you'd think that voice controls would be implemented so that you would actually, you know, use your voice as the control. Apparently Spotify doesn't think this. The way that you use Spotify Voice is: you go to the search tab (have to touch the screen), tap the microphone (another touch), say what you want to play (finally), and then select from a few choices that the app gives you (which requires you to touch the screen again). The amount of touching the screen that you have to do when using the voice controls makes them completely useless. Not to mention, the what it actually does isn't very good either. Earlier today, a few hours before I started to write this, I tested it using some of the things I remember reading that I could tell it to do. First, I told it "Play some ELO" to see if it could accurately give me a playlist or album from them (and I used them because I like them and would know how good the results would be). Let's just say it wasn't very good. The first thing it gave me was the artist page, just the page. The thing it thinks I want the most when I say to play an artist is to just pull up a glorified discography. After that was the ELO playlist that I made, with just the songs that I listen to a lot. Great, if I wanted to listen to that playlist I could've done it with 3 less taps and 15 seconds faster. After that was just a couple of playlists from the artist page. Ok, so: asking it to play a specific artist doesn't work. I remember reading that you could ask it to play music you like, so I did. "Play some music I'd like." It's even worse now. The first result is Tony Booth, a singer who I had never heard of or listened to. And to add insult injury, he's a country singer. I have never listened to country on Spotify because I don't like country. The other few results were just as inaccurate as Mr. Booth was. Cool, so pretty much everything that it said I could ask it doesn't really work, no big deal in the grand scheme of things. It's not like it said it could do something that it just blatantly can't. I won't try to keep that up, of course it fucking did. In the legal terms within the app under "Voice" in settings, it talks about a "wake word" that you could say and it would start listening to you as you requested your music. So basically exactly what is expected of voice controls, that being able to use solely your voice to control the app. And it's not actually a thing in the app. When I first discovered this a few weeks ago, I went online to see if there was anything I was missing. What I found was a forum post of the Spotify Help Board from early 2018, asking about what the wake word was and how to set it up. It didn't receive a reply from a moderator until mid-2020. And guess what it said. Something along the lines of "Thanks for the suggestion! Here's a link to a page where you can suggest features for the app." On a post asking for clarification on something that the app said it had already. And I can't show it to you because as of writing this, I can not find it. I know it exists because I saw it a few weeks ago when I initially went through this, but now it's just gone. And today, when I tried out the voice controls, I also went back to the legal terms in settings to see what it said about everything. Any mention of specific commands and the wake word have been wiped from there. Much like the forum post, I know that it used to exist because it's the reason why I'm as riled up as I am about this. And it still accepted the commands, because it turned up results, however awful they may have been. Spotify: I pay you a monthly fee for premium service with specific perks and conveniences. When you tell me that something exists for premium users (and you actually detail how they're supposed to work) I expect it to work how you say it does, or at least for it to exist.