Finding a great podcast has always been harder than finding a great song. Music discovery has algorithms, charts, and decades of refinement behind it. Podcasts, with their sprawling back catalogs and thousands of new shows every week, have always been trickier to navigate.
Spotify is now taking a direct swing at that problem. Starting today, the company’s Prompted Playlist feature, which launched earlier this year for music in the US and Canada, is expanding to include podcasts. It is currently rolling out in beta for Premium users in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden, and works in English only for now.
How does Spotify’s Prompted Playlist work for podcasts?
Prompted Playlist is Spotify’s AI-powered feature that lets you describe what you want to listen to in plain language and then builds a personalized playlist around that. To get started, you tap “Create” in the app and select Prompted Playlist.
From there, you type in your request. You could ask for a playlist of highly rated true crime series full of twists, a lineup of the latest entertainment news covering music and film, or a deep dive into science and weird discoveries.
Spotify’s algorithm then pulls from your listening history alongside real-time signals like trends and charts to build something that feels both personal and current.
How to customize your Spotify Prompted Playlist for podcasts?
You can edit your prompt or start completely fresh at any time, giving you full control over the direction of your playlist. Each episode that lands in your playlist comes with a short note explaining why it was included, so you understand the connection rather than just being handed a random list.
You can also set your playlist to refresh daily or weekly so it never goes stale, with the option to choose specific days for weekly updates.
If you aren’t sure where to begin, Spotify’s own culture team has created ready-made prompts that appear on your Home screen, designed to give you a starting point that you can then customize to your own taste.