Josh Constine, TechCrunch:

Spotify has a new voice search interface that lets you say “Play my Discover Weekly,” “Show Calvin Harris” or “Play some upbeat pop” to pull up music.

If this was an app that someone created as an experiment, that’d be one thing. But this comes from Spotify’s own R&D.

Hard to say what kind of impact this will have on Apple’s music and smart speaker ambitions. After all, Apple Music, HomePod, and Siri are all part of a much larger ecosystem. And though Spotify does dominate the paid music sector, it’s reach does not extend into anything larger. Yet.

I can’t help but think that Spotify would be an enticing partner for Google or Amazon, more so if they built a bridge to marry their musical intelligence (they have access to a massive trove of user data) with intelligent musical speech command processing and, say, Amazon’s Echo installed base.

This is an interesting development, worth keeping an eye on.