Thank you for subscribing!

It does the heavy lifting when curating the perfect playlist

Another day, another announcement about a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) feature coming to your favourite app.

But the latest addition to the Spotify app has convinced us that AI belongs in music streaming. No, seriously.

It's because this new feature is designed to save time with one of the most tedious parts of using Spotify: building our own playlists. We've never been the type to spend hours manually curating the perfect mix. While plenty of Spotify users enjoy hand-picking every track, we've always found the process surprisingly time-consuming.

That's why the new AI assistant feels like the first AI feature on Spotify that genuinely improves the listening experience, rather than simply showing off what the technology can do.

And we ran to try it as soon as it became available on the app.

The magic isn't that AI simply throws together random songs.

Instead, the playlists feel like they're built from a combination of our own instructions and our listening history.

You tell Spotify what you're looking for from this new playlist, and it fills in the gaps using everything it already knows about your music taste. We've asked it to build playlists to help me focus while working, soundtracks for long runs, and calming collections for meditation sessions.

Each one has felt surprisingly personal rather than generic. For instance, it picked up on the fact that we listen to more classical music when working or studying. For workouts, it immediately spotted that we listen to rap or pop without us needing to specifically type it out into the instructions.

Considering we listened to more than 72,000 minutes using the Spotify app last year — admittedly lower than some previous years — we feel fairly qualified to judge whether Spotify understands our taste. After so many hours spent feeding the algorithm, it's reassuring to see it finally put that knowledge to good use.

But one of the biggest surprises is how well it balances familiarity with discovery.

The assistant doesn't simply regurgitate songs already sitting in your Liked Songs. Instead, it mixes tracks you already know with artists and songs you've never heard before but are genuinely likely to enjoy.

That's a much better way to discover music than endlessly relying on curated charts or algorithmic mixes that can sometimes feel repetitive.

There's a refresh button sitting neatly at the bottom. Tap it, and Spotify swaps in fresh recommendations while sticking to the original brief.

It feels less like starting from scratch and more like asking a friend for a few new recommendations.

It's also much more welcome than Spotify's AI DJ, which was designed to feel more like a personalised radio host experience than a set playlist.

It was an interesting idea, but it's a feature we've never really taken to.

The concept of a personalised AI host that learns your listening habits sounds appealing, yet in practice it often feels more distracting than helpful. The constant introductions between songs interrupt the listening experience, and more often than not, we find ourselves skipping through them to get back to the music.

We also found it often repeated the same songs after a while, which was frustrating if we were looking to discover something new.

That's what makes the AI playlist assistant such a welcome addition. Rather than trying to become part of the listening experience, it simply creates a playlist based on our prompt and listening history, then steps aside. It delivers the personalisation without the unnecessary commentary, making it a far more practical use of AI.

One thing we quickly noticed is that playlist length isn't always as accurate as we'd like.

When I asked Spotify to create an eight-hour playlist, it happily obliged... with one lasting roughly five and a half hours instead.

That's hardly a deal-breaker, especially since the playlists can already become impressively long, but if you're planning music for a marathon drive or an all-day event, you may still need to top it up yourself.