Discover New Podcasts with Spotify's Prompt Playlists

On Tuesday, Spotify announced an expansion of its Prompt Playlist feature to include podcasts, a move designed to help Premium users discover new shows more efficiently. Originally debuting as a music-only beta last December, the tool allows users to create customized Discover Weekly-style lists by using text instructions to steer the algorithm toward specific genres or topics.

The latest update enables similar functionality for podcast playlists, although the feature remains in beta testing. At present, English language support is limited to Premium subscribers located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.

In my trial, the AI required a few minutes to construct the playlist, involving a humor verification step, yet the outcome was surprisingly satisfying. I asked for a blend of well-known and obscure Dungeons & Dragons actual play series. A notable drawback emerged: the tool pulls episodes randomly, posing issues for narrative-driven shows requiring sequential listening.

Resolving this is straightforward. Once generated, the prompt can be edited to update the list. I added a constraint to include only premiere episodes. The revised AI selection proved more thorough, covering Dimension 20 and Critical Role, plus lesser-known titles like Legend of the Dirty Dragon and Join the Party.

Every episode comes with a concise AI-generated summary linking it to the prompt. Despite my usual skepticism toward AI abstracts, the summaries were precise, such as labeling Dimension 20: Fantasy High as fun with genuine stakes. While somewhat ambiguous, they remained accurate.

Post-generation, users may manually adjust the list or update the prompt if the AI choices are unsatisfactory. Although I do not intend to use this for music, it serves podcast listeners well, particularly for premiere samplers. Setting periodic refreshes allows for daily or weekly curated picks.

To experiment with this feature, launch the Spotify app, choose Create, and select Prompt Playlist from the menu. Enter your preferred podcast genres in the text field and hit Generate Playlist.