Amazon Music’s Topics introduces AI recommendations
Amazon’s new AI-powered feature promises to clean up your recommendations, bringing you the very best content suited to your tastes.
AI is expanding once more in our favourite platforms to help curate our experience on a personal level. Amazon Music have unveiled their latest AI tool in Topics, a new tool for discovering podcasts. The feature is rolling out across top podcasts on Amazon Music.
Topics acts as the name suggests, allowing you to browse podcasts by the topics they cover. We’re not talking broad genres here like True Crime. Topics get down to the niche subjects: Amazon show subjects like Caffeine, Coffee, and Dopamine on a general topic podcast’s episode specifically about the effects of caffeine.
This ability to break individual episodes down into their subject matter rather than overall podcast channels opens up huge potential for discovery. Users can more easily find episodes that appeal to them through Topics, even if the channel doesn’t offer content that would appeal to them in other episodes.
Amazon says: “Topics unlocks audio content by making podcasts browsable to listeners in a way they have never been able to before. Amazon Music’s Topics focus on the subject matter or content of the episode and make it easy to peruse other related podcasts, guided by your specific interests.”
Amazon’s AI analyses each podcast’s transcripts and descriptions to identify the topics discussed in it. Alongside human review, the AI tags a podcast with its key topics. Amazon continue: “As we continue to expand the coverage of Topics to more podcast content, the number of topics and the quality of related episodes will continue to improve.”
To use Topics to find podcasts that appeal to your interests:
- Download the latest version of the Amazon Music mobile app on iOS or Android mobile
- Tap on Podcasts at the top of the Home screen
- Tap on a popular podcast such as The Daily, SmartLess, or This American Life, and then tap on a specific episode
- Look for Topics tag buttons below the episode description
- Tap on a Topics tag to explore a list of related podcast episodes on the same topic
Topics acts a little like the sibling to Amazon Music’s Maestro, an AI-powered playlist maker launched in April. The tool allows users to create playlists from prompts, spoken and written, or even emojis. The AI creates a selection of music it thinks best suits the vibe. The feature is currently only available to Amazon Music Unlimited customers in the US on mobile devices as they test.