- Spotify now offers AI summaries for audiobooks
- It’s in beta testing in the Spotify app for iOS
- You can catch up on the titles in a few minutes.
It’s not always easy to get back to the halfway point of an audiobook, especially if you return after several weeks or months, but Spotify wants to help: It’s introducing AI-powered summaries of everything you’ve heard in an audiobook so far.
The feature works a little like those “previously on…” recaps you see at the beginning of TV shows, and will “help you easily reconnect with a story without needing to listen to it again,” according to Spotify. All you have to do to activate them is tap the Recap button on the audiobook page.
The summaries will only go as far as your current listening point, so there should be no spoilers. They’re available once you’ve spent 15 to 20 minutes reading an audiobook, and then they’re updated periodically as you continue listening.
Spotify says the feature is now available in beta for the iOS app, for a “limited selection” of English titles. Once Spotify has tweaked and refined the feature and received some feedback from users, it will begin to roll out more widely.
Kindle version when?
According to Spotify’s announcement, it does not use audiobook content to perform any AI model training, and AI does not replace narration or original content. It’s there simply to help you catch up and perhaps finish titles you previously abandoned.
It’s probably useful if you want to go back to an audiobook you previously abandoned or if you fell asleep the night before with the audiobook still playing and aren’t sure what happened in the plot most recently.
Presumably the summaries, developed “in collaboration with our publishing partners,” Spotify says, aren’t going to blow away plot twists or imaginary characters, but if they do, that should be something that’s pointed out during the beta phase.
This is something that would also be useful for the written word, if you’re paying attention, e-reader manufacturers? An AI where you can get summaries and ask questions about everything you’ve read in a book so far sounds incredibly useful, whether you’re reading an e-book or need a companion app for your actual book.
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