Spotify Introduces AI-Powered Audiobook Recaps to Help Listeners Stay Engaged

Spotify's new audiobook recap feature uses AI to remind you of the story so far

Spotify is launching a new AI feature for audiobooks that summarizes what you've already heard without needing to rewind. The company likens the feature, called Recaps, to a "previously on" segment at the start of episodes in a TV series. Recaps will be available automatically in the iOS app for a limited number of English-language audiobooks, with plans to expand to more audiobooks in an unspecified time frame. While the Recap button is always present on supported titles, you will have to listen to more than 15-20 minutes of the audiobook to get a summary, according to the Spotify blog post on the feature. After that, Recaps will be "regularly updated" as you progress through the audiobook. It's "designed to help people finish the books they start," the company says in the blog. True-crime author J.H. Markert called the feature "an audio bookmark that speaks" in the company blog. "Using it once blew my mind. As sophisticated as it is smart, this feature is a must for any audiobook lovers out there." Spotify made clear that Recaps uses AI, but maintains that the original works -- including the book content and voice narration -- remain protected. "We are not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes or voice generation, and Recaps do not replicate narration or replace the original audiobook in any way," Spotify's research director of LLMs, Paul Bennett, wrote in the blog post. In February, Spotify partnered with AI company ElevenLabs to bring to the platform more AI-narrated audiobooks. But the company has faced backlash for its slow reaction to the proliferation of AI slop in its music platform. In September, it released policies aiming to tamp down on slop with better AI detection tools and disclosure of AI in song creation. Spotify also began working with music labels on "responsible" AI music tools without offering details on what those might be.

Spotify's new Recaps audiobook tool is here to save you from your own memory failure

Each Recap becomes available after 15-20 minutes of listening and updates as you progress. Spotify is rolling out a new Recaps feature, and it's one a lot of us could've used ages ago. If you've ever returned to an audiobook after a chaotic week and realized you remember exactly two characters and zero plot threads, Recaps is here to save you from your own memory gaps. The tool, currently in beta on iOS, uses AI to generate a short audio summary of whatever you've already listened to. After 15 to 20 minutes of playtime, a Recap button appears at the top of the audiobook page you're currently engaging with. Tap it and Spotify will deliver a tight, spoiler-free rundown of past events, jogging your memory without ruining anything yet to come. The idea is that you're able to dive back in without rewinding. The company stresses that its AI involvement ends with summarization. It is not training big models on audiobook content or attempting to mimic narrator voices. Instead, the tool fits into a broader push to make long-form content easier to return to. Kindles, for instance, now offer a "Story So Far" recap when you pop back into a book after too many days away. As is often the case with beta features, there are limitations for now. Recaps only work on select English-language titles, and publishers can opt out entirely, meaning your current listen may not support it. Still, it's a practical addition for anyone who hops between titles or comes back to a book after life inevitably gets in the way. Recaps won't overhaul the audiobook experience, but they might help you avoid rewinding half a chapter at a time. If Spotify expands availability and widens support, it could become a subtle quality-of-life tool listeners learn to rely on.

This new Spotify feature changed how I listen to audiobooks

Since audiobooks were added to Spotify Premium's lineup of content, my consumption of them skyrocketed. Much like podcasts, I like to listen to them when I'm in the car or at the gym. They're often an entertaining way to experience a book, and are sometimes read by their writers, or the actors who've starred in their movie or TV show versions. The problem with audiobooks -- and regular books, for that matter -- is that if you've let them sit for a while, like I often do, going back can be like starting the book from scratch. Plots and characters are forgotten, and the deeper you' get, the harder it is to get back up to speed. But when Spotify recently announced its new beta "Recap" feature for iOS, which uses AI to serve you up a short, spoken little catch-up session, I wanted to give it a try. So I did! What is Spotify's audiobook "Recap" and how does it work? As per Spotify's press release, Recaps are "short audio summaries tailored to your most recent listening point." The feature, though public, is still in beta, and is only available on a select number of titles in Spotify's audiobooks library. They're not categorized, though, so you'll only know which when you open one. After listening to an eligible title for 15 to 20 minutes, a 90-second AI-generated audio recap is created that you can listen to before you continue the audiobook from where you left off. The Recap is updated to match your progress as you listen to the audiobook, only covering the portion of the book you've listened to, and it's all spoken by an AI voice at the tap of the new "Recap" button. It doesn't use full book summaries or excerpts from the book to do it, and Spotify says it avoids spoilers, which is thoughtful of them. "Designed to reduce friction and keep you immersed, Recaps are part of our ongoing effort to make audiobook listening more seamless, intuitive, and listener-friendly," Spotify says. Spotify's audiobooks are available to Premium subscribers (Individual, Duo, or Family) as part of the service, and non-Premium users can purchase individual titles à la carte. For the time being, Recaps are not available on the desktop app or Android devices, but hopefully, after the beta is done, this will change, because it's a nice new feature that I've so far found really helpful. What are Recaps like? Recaps showed up on my Spotify app the day it was announced, and I was eager to give it a try. As advertised, it wasn't available on any of the audiobooks I already had on the go -- The Fellowship of the Ring being one of them, but that's OK, no recaps needed for that. After flipping through some of the recommended titles in the Audiobooks section of the app, I landed on Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, as read by Wil Wheaton, which displayed the "Recap" button beneath the "Add to Library" and "Download" buttons. With 15 to 20 minutes necessary to generate a recap, I hit play and listened. Eventually, the Recap button changed from greyed-out to white, indicating that it was available. The AI voice is male, friendly, and articulate, and its summary of the 20 or so minutes l'd listened to was accurate. As promised, the 90-second recap also didn't spoil anything, not that there was much to spoil at just one chapter in. After listening to a couple more chapters, I checked in with the Recap to compare, and it delivered a more condensed summary of the chapters I'd listened to, again with decent accuracy and no spoilers. But seeing as I'd just listened to the summarized chapters, it was hard to assess how helpful the feature is at jogging your memory. To test this, I let a couple more chapters play with the volume at zero, and then waited the weekend before listening to the Reacap -- in an effort to kind of simulate forgetting what I'd read. The recap did a great job, giving me a concise summary that included the major characters introduced at that point, their relationships to one another, and the main plot points and the character arcs in context. It made me feel confident continuing on with the audiobook. Where do we go from here? For easily-distracted and memory-challenged people like me, the Recap feature is a welcome addition to Spotify that I hope will encourage me to complete the audiobooks I start more often. I like its simplicity and the summaries are well done, but as it rolls out I'm hopeful for a few updated and additions. Starting with the obvious, it'd be great to see the feature expanded to other operating systems, like Android, as well as to the desktop apps. Offering it in more languages is also a given, as is adding it to many more titles. A couple of nice-to-haves include the ability to request either a mini recap as well as an extended recap with a bit more detail, if you should choose -- especially if you're much further along in the book. It'd also be cool if we could change the narrator's voice, although I recognize that the AI doing it in the voice of person reading the book might pose a bunch of AI rights issues. Spotify's new audiobooks Recap is the feature I didn't know I wanted, but after spending a few days with it I think it's a nice addition that I'm hoping will help encourage my audiobook consumption. Spotify Subscription with ads No ads on any paid plan Price Starting at $11.99/month, or $5.99/month for students Spotify is a pioneer in music streaming. It features a vast library, impressive bitrate, curated and custom playlists, as well as offline streaming. Spotify is available for free and for a monthly or annual fee. See Available Plans Expand Collapse

Spotify now uses AI to recap your audiobooks for you -- here's why that makes me mad

Spotify has just rolled out a "Recap" feature for audiobooks. Imagine a TV series' "Last week, on Friends" montage at the start of an episode. Spotify's audiobook recap works in the exact same way. Once you've listened to 15-20 minutes of an audiobook, Spotify generates a recap using AI. This is a tailored recap that tells you exactly what has happened, so you can pick up your book from where you left off. Spotify announced that Recap is available in beta on the iOS app, but only for a select few English-language audiobooks. If you're worried about AI data, Spotify has said that "We are not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes or voice generation, and Recaps do not replicate narration or replace the original audiobook in any way." I've seen a few people treat Recap with trepidatious optimism, but I'm not convinced. Here's why I'm erring more on the "trepidatious" side. Spotify is the most convenient music streaming service there is, hands down. There's no other music streamer that has mastered the art of ultra-convenience, offering AI-generated playlists, Daily Mixes, and even short-form video content within the app. But I don't think everything should be that convenient. Things feel better when you have to work for them. Making playlists is fun. Discovering your next favorite music is fun. Watching whole music videos is fun! That's why I feel a little apprehensive about the new Recap feature. Reading is one of my favorite hobbies. I read every single day, and I look forward to my reading session. I love curling up on my reading armchair and hallucinating wildly for the next few hours. Or enjoying audiobook voice artists perform their roles admirably -- that's what audiobooks are all about. Where's the joy in an AI-generated voice reminding me of what I've missed in the story? Where's the appreciation for the author, for the art of literature, or the unbridled joy that reading brings me? The author of the book I'm reading didn't spend multiple years of their life toiling away, painstakingly editing each word and constructing involute plots for me to offload my reading onto an AI. I'm not just talking about reading with my eyes, by the way -- this includes audiobooks, too. When you listen to audiobooks, you're still getting the novel in the way the author intended. And you get the added bonus of hearing talented actors show off their performing abilities, bringing your book to life. I know the Recap feature is intended to make my life easier. There are some obvious reasons why this could be useful: A new book in a series is coming out, and I've forgotten what happened in the last book; I have to read a book before an event or book club; I stopped reading a book six months ago, and now I want to pick it back up. But all these reasons feel very superficial. If I love a book series enough to read the next release, surely I have 24 hours in which I can listen to the previous book? If I need to read a book for a book club but I outsource that to an AI, why am I even going to a book club in the first place? If I stopped reading a book six months ago, why don't I just start it again to get the full story? It also raises the question: Can AI truly convey nuance? It can't infer, it can't notice motifs and themes, and all the literary things authors spend years trying to perfect. If the AI recaps a book for me, surely it's going to miss all those little titbits of information? What if it misses the fact that the love interest brushes their hand against the main character's cheek on page 121? What if I then don't feel as attached to the characters when they do finally get together on page 345, because there's no yearning? What do you think about the Recap feature? Let me know in the comments if you agree with me or not. The new Recap feature is certainly not useless. As I said earlier, there are three main reasons why this could be a good thing. A new book in a series, you have to read before an event, but don't have time, you stopped reading, and now you want to pick it back up again. But all of these reasons forget why we read in the first place: The pure joy of literature. There's nothing like snuggling up with a good book and reading until your eyes feel like sandpaper. Or, if you're an audiobook connoisseur, listening until you fall asleep. There's a reason why everyone I know is rewatching Stranger Things right now. Not because we're asking ChatGPT to recount the events of seasons 1-4, but because we genuinely love the show and want to experience it again. So why would I want to recap books in the same way? We live in a society that seems to chase convenience over anything else. But what about our hobbies? Are we really going to start using AI to condense our favorite games, to tell us what happened in the local sports events, rather than watch the real thing? I think we should be spending more time doing our hobbies now that AI is making the annoying, mundane tasks in our lives much easier. And recapping audiobooks is not something I'm ever going to be interested in.

Spotify will now use AI to recap your audiobooks for you - and I really need this for my Kindle

It's not always easy jumping back into the mid-point of an audiobook, especially if you're coming back after several weeks or months, but Spotify wants to help: it's introducing AI-powered recaps of everything in an audiobook you've listened to so far. The feature works a bit like those "previously on..." recaps you see at the start of TV shows, and will "help you easily reengage with a story without needing to relisten", according to Spotify. All you do to activate them is tap the Recap button on the audiobook page. The recaps will only go up to your current listening point, so there shouldn't be any spoilers. They're available once you're 15-20 minutes into an audiobook, and are then updated regularly as your listening progresses. Spotify says the feature is now available in beta for the iOS app, for a "limited selection" of titles in English. Once Spotify has tweaked and refined the feature, and got some feedback from users, it'll begin rolling out more widely. As per Spotify's announcement, it isn't using audiobook content to do any AI model training, and the AI doesn't replace the narration or any of the original content. It's just there to help you catch up - and maybe finish titles you previously abandoned. It's likely to be useful if you're wanting to get back into an audiobook you previously abandoned, or if you fell asleep the night before with the audiobook still playing and aren't sure what's happened in the plot most recently. Presumably the recaps - developed "in collaboration with our publishing partners", Spotify says - aren't going to hallucinate plot twists or imaginary characters, but if they do, that should be something that's flagged up during the beta phase. This is something that would be useful for the written word too, if you're paying attention, ereader makers? An AI you can get recaps from, and ask questions of, about everything you've read in a book so far sounds incredibly useful, whether you're reading an e-book or need a companion app for your real book.

Spotify's New AI-Powered Audiobook Recaps Will Remind You Where You Left Off

AI Recaps will not 'replicate narration' from the audiobook, so don't expect to hear actual clips. If you're anything like me, you'll come back to a book or TV show after pausing it for a few days or weeks, only to have to spend hours on a wiki reminding yourself of where you left off, while also trying to dodge spoilers. Spotify is doing its best to fix at least one of those problems, by testing AI recaps for some of its audiobooks. It's the first new AI-powered feature in a while that I would actually use. In fact, I've played a few video games with similar features (not powered by AI, admittedly), and it's always such a value-add that it makes me pine for it in pretty much every other piece of media I engage with. Here's how Spotify's new feature works: First, you unfortunately do need to be using the Spotify app for iOS, so Android, web, or desktop listeners are out of luck, at least during this beta test. Then, you'll need to have listened to a supported English language audiobook for at least 15-20 minutes. After that, you'll see a Recap button at the top of the page that will quickly generate a one- to two-minute-long summary of what's happened in the book so far, which Spotify promises will be spoiler-free for future plot events. Spotify's likening it to a "previously on" segment on a TV show, although it also says that, "Recaps do not replicate narration or replace the original audiobook in any way," so don't expect to hear actual clips from the book, nor an AI voice trying to mimic the narrator. However, just as TV's "previously on" segments will change with new episodes, your AI Recap will be "regularly updated to match your progress." As for any potential issues with the feature, the company says it is "not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes or voice generation" and that authors can opt out of having Recaps on their books. Still, there are a few caveats, including the fact that the Recap feature isn't free. On the plus side, it is included alongside the free audiobook hours you get with Spotify Premium, as well as any add-on hours you might buy. But otherwise, audiobooks on Spotify need to be bought on a per-book basis, so for users without Spotify Premium and with no audiobooks in their libraries (that's me), there's no way to try AI Recaps before you buy, which means it's maybe not a convincing reason to swap audiobook platforms just yet. Spotify's also not being upfront about which books have Recaps, so it could be a bit before you see the button pop up for you. So while I like the idea in theory, I'm probably not going to get to test it anytime soon. (I've reached out to Spotify to ask for a current list of books with Recaps enabled, and will update this article when I hear back.) Another potential issue with these Recaps: hallucinations. Spotify didn't address accuracy at all in its announcement, which I'd like to think implies the company is feeling pretty confident it won't be an issue. But there is still a potential for an AI to misreport specific details of your story, or accidentally slip a spoiler in regardless of what Spotify claims. One would hope your memory would be jogged enough by a general outline to catch inconsistencies, but still, it might be worth keeping a few notes while you read, just in case. If you aren't a Spotify audiobook listener or just haven't gotten to try the beta, I'll give you a cheat: You can already ask other AI chatbots for book summaries for free. So long as you remember where you left off, just head over to your AI of choice and ask for a summary up to that point. Here's one for the opening chapters of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I won't deny that there's real convenience in having a summary feature baked directly into your app, especially one that doesn't require you to cross reference where you left off lest you, I don't know, spoil the Red Wedding for yourself or something. But if you're like me (not a Spotify audiobook customer), at least you're not out of options.

Spotify's New AI Feature Could Transform the Way You Listen to Audiobooks

Recaps are currently available on iOS for a limited number of English-language audiobooks, with expansion plans underway. Spotify's new feature makes it easier to pick up an audiobook where you left off, without needing to rewind or listen to previous chapters. Spotify introduced the AI-powered feature, called "Recaps," on Thursday, describing it in a press release as a "powerful" tool that gives listeners short audio summaries of the portion of the book they've already heard. When returning to an audiobook after some time away, users can tap the Recap button at the top of the audiobook page to hear an AI-generated summary of what has happened so far in the book. The feature is similar to a "previously on" segment at the beginning of a TV show episode. The first Recap becomes available after a reader listens to the first 15 to 20 minutes of an audiobook, and subsequent Recaps are updated as a reader makes progress through the story. Recaps are designed to cover only the portion of the book the user has already listened to, so there are no spoilers for upcoming chapters. The feature helps people finish the books they start and is especially useful for listeners who pause audiobooks for days or weeks and want to quickly refresh their memories before diving back in. Related: Spotify's Founder and Longtime CEO Is Stepping Down: 'To Be Clear, I'm Not Leaving' Recaps are "an audio bookmark that speaks," J.H. Markert, author of Spider to the Fly, said in a press release. "Using it once blew my mind. As sophisticated as it is smart, this feature is a must for any audiobook lovers out there." It's unclear how long Recaps are or what voice they will use. Spotify said that the original work of authors and narrators "stays protected" with Recaps, and that the company is not using audiobook content to train AI models or generate AI voices. Most audiobooks on Spotify are not free, though some are included with select Premium plans. Premium Individual ($12 per month), Family ($20 per month) and Duo ($17 per month) plan subscribers get 15 hours of audiobook listening time per month. The Recaps feature is currently in beta and available on iOS for a limited number of English-language audiobooks, with expansion plans underway. Related: Spotify Has Paid Out More Than $100 Million to Podcast Creators -- and It Isn't Done Giving Away Money This isn't Spotify's first venture into AI in audiobooks. In February, Spotify partnered with AI voice generation company ElevenLabs to add more AI-narrated audiobooks to its offerings, announcing that it would start accepting audiobooks recorded using ElevenLabs' AI voice platform. ElevenLabs allows authors to narrate their audiobooks in 29 languages, including English, Mandarin and Spanish, using AI-generated voices. Spotify has also recently faced pushback for the proliferation of AI-generated music on its platform. In September, the company took steps to address its AI music problem, stating that it was rolling out a new music spam filter to detect spam tracks.