Spotify is rolling out new features again for its audiobook listeners. AI is, of course, grabbing most of the headlines, as always. The new AI feature it has introduced is called “Prompted Playlist,” and it essentially does exactly what you would imagine. It lets listeners ask Spotify to create an audiobook playlist for them for the year using a very wide set of parameters.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Listeners can specify the length of the audiobooks so they stay within their subscription plan and then ask for anything they can think of, such as, in Spotify’s example, a list in which each book fits the month.
The second new feature is a back-and-forth, audio-prompted chatbot. It’s an audiobook version of something introduced for music last month, allowing listeners to ask questions about the book they’re listening to and to ask those questions as a voice-driven conversation.
But the feature I found most interesting in the Spotify blog on the new audiobook offerings was very low-tech, essentially an audiobook version of the “next episode” functionality we are all used to from streaming TV. When you listen to a book you love and it’s part of a series, Spotify will allow you, with one click, to start the next book in the series straightaway and will also provide a range of ways to discover more by the same author more easily.
For anyone who writes a series of books, it’s a very good way of capturing readers who have just discovered you and want to binge on everything you’ve written.
All of this comes as Spotify announced some very healthy figures for the second quarter of 2026. The most significant of these is that it has now surpassed 300 million Premium subscribers, a 9 percent year-on-year increase. The new tools have also been reported as an expansion of Spotify’s AI-powered audiobook-discovery features.image.jpg
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