The Spotify company is mostly known for its popular streaming music service and accompanying software or apps. Now the company is looking to make a foray into physical products as they are reportedly testing a smart assistant that will be implemented into cars.
As reported by The Verge, the new hardware will be called Car Thing and will help Spotify learn how customers consume music. Some of their premium subscribers are expected to receive the new device free of charge as a trial. It will plug into vehicles’ cigarette lighters to receive power and will connect via Bluetooth to smartphones and car audio systems. Owners will say “Hey Spotify” to activate the device and then ask for a specific song, playlist, or artist, among other music requests.
The Car Thing device will reportedly have a circular display screen on one side. That screen will show owners what is being played at the moment. The other side features buttons for accessing specific playlist presets among other things. It doesn’t appear as if this will handle voice assistant requests that items such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri currently work with.
Spotify’s Car Thing testing will begin over the next several weeks, exclusively in the United States. As of right now, sources close to the company have indicated it’s unknown how long the testing phase will run for. Additionally, it doesn’t appear as it the device will launch “as-is” or even go out in a more widespread release to the general public. That could always change based on the testing results, though.
Still, Spotify is known for its popular music streaming service which is available in free or paid subscriptions. It allows for accessing millions of songs from all genres of music. Free and paid Spotify members can create their own playlists of songs to listen to at any time. A blog post via Spotify indicated that the company’s focus “remains on becoming the world’s number one audio platform — not on creating hardware.”
Dil Bole Oberoi
