Spotify's hardware ambitions seem like a risky distraction

We can't be sure about what Spotify is actually trying to build in Stockholm, but its search for employees are in line with what you'd expect from a company trying to make a smart speaker. Last April, Spotify was looking for people with expertise in voice recognition and natural language processing. And more recently Spotify sought out someone with "graduate-level expertise" in natural language understanding to join its team in Boston and "multiple years of industrial experience in building conversational agents via speech or text (e.g., chatbots)." This focus on a spoken interface could apply to future, voice-controlled versions of the Spotify app, but it's not much of a stretch to think Spotify could be trying to build a Google Home or Sonos rival. Let's say for the sake of argument that's what's going on.