Amazon adds Alexa to its Music Unlimited app to try and get people to shout at their phone
The feature allows the app to work as a chatty DJ, not just a silent librarian
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Your support makes all the difference.Amazon has finally added its chatty personal assistant, Alexa, to its music app.
The change isn’t simply a feature update but an entirely new way of requesting music from your phone, Amazon said.
Now people can ask for specific tracks or artists simply by shouting at their phone. But they can also ask for more complicated things: requesting that the phone play them an automatically generated playlist of “happy 80s pop songs”, for instance – which the app will then create.
Alexa is already well known for her appearance in Amazon’s collection of Echo smart speakers, which can play music simply by shouting at them. But it has gradually been rolling out into other products, including those not made by Amazon – and has now made it into Amazon Music Unlimited, its competitor to Spotify and Apple Music.
Apple Music already offers some of the same features through Siri. But Spotify – which concentrates on streaming itself – requires people to search with their hands.
Amazon said that it had added the feature partly because it thinks that the growth in streaming won’t simply be coming from smartphones, which led the first stage of the take-up of streaming music. Now, growth in streaming is likely to come from the home and then the car – both of which will require the voice, it said.
The decision was part of Amazon’s broader mission to make music streaming more mainstream.
“We know there are plenty of streaming options out there and that really it’s about taking this to a mainstream audience,” said Paul Firth, the company’s head of digital music in the UK.
As such, it was important to make the feature in such a way that people knew straight away how to use it. It needed to be talked to like a personal DJ, not a computer, said Mr Firth.
“It’s not just about the convenience of the scenarios in which I think you’d do this – when you’re running, or driving, or are just too busy,” he said. “It’s actually the fact that we’ve enhanced the experience, because we’ve made it easy to get exactly the music you want. It’s what takes it from being a feature release to something that actually changes the way you use the app.”
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