Microsoft applies for patent to turn Cortana into your personal DJ

Microsoft has applied for a new patent which would turn Cortana into your personal DJ. Well beyond just making personalized playlists, the service would use AI and draw from a wide variety of information sources (such as your calendar), sensors such as GPS, Bluetooth and the accelerometer, and also crowdsourcing, to find opportunities to offer to play music, create playlists which are varied, taking into account what you listened to before, and the location and circumstances you listened to it to, what your friends are listening to and more to provide the perfect musical accompaniment at just the right time.

Microsoft even suggests their digital AI would be able to find live music events and purchase tickets for yourself and your friends.

In their abstract Microsoft explains:

A digital assistant supported across devices such as smartphones, tablets, personal computers (PCs), wearable computing devices, game consoles, and the like is configured to interact with one or more music and/or search services so that various user experiences, content, or features that enhance a user’s involvement with music and other media content can be integrated with the digital assistant and rendered as a native digital assistant user experience. The digital assistant is configured to behave like the user’s personal radio host or disc jockey (DJ), for example, by determining the user’s intent and preferences, maintaining awareness of history and context, performing tasks and actions to curate personalized playlists and offer them at contextually-relevant times and places, providing information, recommendations, content, and commentary relating to the user’s music, and proactively interacting with the user to make existing music easy to find and new music easy to discover.

The patent dates from November 2016, and given that we have not seen any of these features show up yet, and that Groove Music is gone, this may be more of an ambitious idea than an actual plan, but hopefully all the pressure from the other AI companies such as Amazon and Google will see Microsoft develop these ideas sooner rather than later.

See the full patent here.

Via Winfuture.de, picture credit Luminaena