Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
It’s a cliché at this point to say that podcasts (and, to a less publicized extent, audiobooks) have a discovery problem. To help fix that, Spotify announced it’s using Google Cloud’s AI tools to improve both content discovery and personalized recommendations for its audio offerings.
With this latest move, Spotify is using Google Cloud’s LLMs (large language models) to analyze the roughly 5 million podcasts and 350,000 audiobooks in its content library with a goal of trying to “augment” the metadata, according to a press release. (The Verge has reached out to Spotify to clarify exactly what “augment” means in this case). A podcast or audiobook’s metadata includes information like the title, the name of the host or author, show notes,…