Spotify’s newest gadget is a voice-activated assistant for your car

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Spotify is diving headfirst into the hardware business. What is it exactly? It’s a car thing. Seriously, that’s the name. Spotify is calling their first piece of hardware “Car Thing.” It’s basically a voice-activated assistant for your car that plays music and podcasts simply by shouting “Hey, Spotify” at the device.

Spotify lifted the veil on Car Thing last week in a recent blog post and from what we can gather, this is something they’re testing with a select number of Spotify Premium subscribers in the US.

The blog post mentions that the company doesn’t even intend on selling these devices. It’s more of a thing where they’ll “learn more about how people listen to music and podcasts” in their cars. The blog post goes on to add “learnings from our test will dictate how we develop experiences everywhere you listen.”

So yea, this sounds like something you won’t be able to go out and buy

It’s more of a thing to help Spotify understand how users listen to stuff in their cars. And that’s a good thing because convincing people to purchase another accessory to listen to music may be a hard sell.

Back in January, we heard rumors about this, but that was about the extent of it. With this latest announcement from Spotify, we now know this to be true, but don’t expect the company to continue to push out hardware, as they said themselves: “Our focus remains on becoming the world’s number one audio platform—not on creating hardware.”

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.