As we’ve explored before, making a playlist that makes you feel like making love (which does not generally include the Bad Company song) can be tricky. You have to set the mood without being too impersonal or too cheesy. So, bless you, Amazon, for attempting to fix this with a vast collection of “music for activities”… including the sexy kind.
Amazon has added over 500 utterances to Alexa, the voice assistant which powers the company’s Echo devices. The idea is that instead of engineering your own playlist or just rolling the dice on the random function, you tell Alexa what you’re doing and it picks the playlist.
For it to work, you’ll need an Alexa enabled device (the Echo or the Dot), an Amazon Prime subscription, or access to Amazon Music Unlimited. Got all those? Simply ask Alexa to, say, play “baby-making jazz music” or “hooking up,” and it will play a custom curated playlist from the Amazon Music team. If you think “baby-making jazz music” is wall to wall saxophone solos, well, you have no idea just how right you are. Although, apparently, what people really want are songs mostly about jorts, if you believe Billboard:
The company also put out data on “sexy” music, which apparently happens more often in the early evenings. The most requests for “sexy” music were logged between 5-6 p.m. and the most requested “sexy” music playlist on Amazon Music Unlimited by name via Alexa was Sexy Country.
We fiddled with the function for a bit, trying different activities, and the biggest flaw is that unless you get specific, you’ll be playing genre roulette. Ask it for music for running, and you might get some country, some EDM, and maybe even classical. Asking it for hooking up music gave us, on the first try, a Strauss waltz. So for this to really work, you’ll need to specify both activity and genre in a way Alexa understands, or you might wind up having to get busy in 3/4 time. So practice up, or you may just kill the mood.
Then again, when we asked it for “sexy EDM,” it informed us there were no sexy EDM songs. So maybe Alexa is better at this than we thought.
(Via TechCrunch)