“What’s going on? I’m X, and from this moment on, I’m gonna be your own personal AI DJ on Spotify. Let’s go.” —Spotify’s new AI DJ, by way of a greeting

The feature, which debuted on February 22, is fueled by years of Spotify machine learning and user listening data—think: The songs you played on repeat in 2018, or the new genre you’ve been into lately—and generative AI from Sonantic, the voice AI company Spotify acquired last summer for a reported ~$95 million.

In the time between the AI DJ’s release and the beginning of March, it saw a notable number of return users: “On days when users tune in, fans spend 25% of their listening time with DJ,” Spotify stated in a blog post.

• The post goes on to say that more than half of first-time listeners used the DJ again the following day.

Spotify has leaned into personalization tech for years, but the past six months—since the Sonantic acquisition—allowed for the generative AI piece of the puzzle and made the feature possible as it works today, according to Zaid Sultan, Spotify’s vice president of personalization.

“From then on, we had that extra magical piece—that was the super realistic but also emotive voice,” Sultan told us. He added: “The last six months are when the generative AI piece has, maybe, been a more prominent part of the story.”

Keep reading here.—HF

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I make healthcare data more accessible and more private by spreading the use of a new technology: synthetic data.

Synthetic data is realistic but not real, meaning it contains all of the insight of real data without containing a single real person’s information. Syntegra creates synthetic data using generative AI to make healthcare innovation easier, faster, and—crucially—safer.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

Syntegra’s synthetic-data approach, far and away. I’ve never been involved in something that could help so many people in so many ways.

Second place: Launching a digital pathology startup to build infrastructure for diagnostic innovation. Like Syntegra, the goal here was to unleash data for AI/ML-driven innovation.

Third: a research project on a clinical decision support tool (basically helping doctors make better treatment decisions), which showed how these tools can double appropriate treatment choices.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

Most? Synthetic data. For AI to get out of the lab and into production, you need model training to be easy, but data is expensive (and, in healthcare, inaccessible). Some synthetic-data startups have already shown the impact in other spaces, but the potential in healthcare is enormous.

Least? Computational biology. Computational biology is the concept of simulating biological processes—basically, re-creating life on a chip. While there are some areas where this will work in the short term—especially around simpler things like protein-folding—I’m pretty suspicious that we’re anywhere close to modeling more complex biological processes with enough detail to find new drugs. There’s just way too much going on, and the unknown unknowns are mind-boggling—but if I’m wrong, the potential impact is equally mind-boggling.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos changed the course of my life. A friend of mine who is a product manager at Microsoft gave it to me during med school, right when I was starting to realize I didn’t love clinical medicine. The clear explanations made the beautiful simplicity of machine learning so alluring that I knew I had to find a way to combine ML and healthcare in my career—which I eventually did after a pit stop in consulting.

Stat: 2.3%. That’s the average decline in property value of homes within a quarter-mile of utility-scale solar farms documented by a research team in a recent survey.

Quote: “Are we out of a drought? Mostly—but not completely,”—California Gov. Gavin Newsom, marking the easing of some drought restrictions in the state

Read: A coastal city in Portugal is offering residents the option to participate in its budgeting process for urban projects—how it works is the focus of this delightful new feature in the New Yorker.

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