Spotify has had an in-app voice assistant for a while now, letting you use your voice to jump straight to a particular song or album and cut down on the number of taps you need to make to start playing tunes. Now it looks like Spotify is working on a way to get you to your music even faster.
A new leak shows that Spotify is working on a "Hey Spotify" hotword for voice activation. The feature was discovered by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who has discovered other upcoming features in apps in the past.
According to the leaked screenshot, you'll need to enable the "Hey Spotify" phrase in the app's settings. Then you can say "Hey Spotify" to launch the same voice assistant that is currently available in Spotify by tapping on the microphone icon in-app.
The one thing to note is that, at least in this iteration of the feature, you can only use "Hey Spotify" when the app is open and on your screen. So it's not like you can say "Hey Spotify, play ______" to begin playing music when your phone is locked or when you're at your home screen.
You can already use Spotify with voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant to begin playing music when you're outside of the Spotify app, so this feature may not be quite as useful as some had hoped when they first heard about it. Still, it could be handy if you like to keep Spotify open while listening to music, like if you enjoy looking at the artwork or if the app is open while you're driving.
There's no word yet on when or if Spotify will launch this "Hey Spotify" feature to the public.
