Discover New Podcasts with Spotify’s Curated Playlists

On Tuesday, Spotify rolled out an update to its Prompted Playlists feature, now including podcasts, making it easier for Premium users to discover new shows. Initially launched in beta last December, this feature was limited to music. Now, you can create tailored Discover Weekly-style playlists by using text prompts to guide the algorithm toward specific genres or themes.

With this latest update, you can apply the same concept to podcast episode playlists. However, it’s still in beta and currently available only in English for Premium users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.

When I tested the updated feature, Spotify’s AI took a few minutes to generate my podcast playlist, even going through a step it called “verifying humor.” I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I requested a playlist of Dungeons & Dragons actual play shows, mixing popular series with some hidden gems. One thing to keep in mind when using this feature for podcasts is that it may pull random episodes, which can be problematic if a show is meant to be listened to in order.

Fortunately, this is easy to adjust. After generating a playlist, you can edit your prompt to refine the selection. I added a note specifying that the playlist should only include the first episodes of campaigns or shows. The new playlist the AI generated was more diverse than I anticipated, featuring episodes from Dimension 20 and Critical Role, along with some lesser-known shows I hadn’t encountered before, like Tales from the Stinky Dragon and Join the Party.

Each episode in the playlist came with a brief AI-generated description explaining how it related to my prompt. While I usually approach AI-generated summaries with skepticism, the descriptions for shows I recognized were accurate, such as Dimension 20: Fantasy High being labeled as “funny with real stakes.” It’s a bit vague, but at least it’s not misleading.

You can add to and manually edit Prompted Playlists after they’re created, or keep tweaking them if the AI’s selections don’t hit the mark. While I’m not inclined to use this feature for music, it could be a handy tool for podcast enthusiasts, especially for compiling a “first episodes” sampler. You can also set the playlist to refresh regularly, giving you new podcast recommendations daily or weekly.

To give the feature a shot, open the Spotify app, select “Create,” and then choose “Prompted Playlist” from the menu. In the prompt text box, describe the type of podcast episodes you want, and hit “Generate playlist.” I encountered an error the first couple of times, indicating that Prompted Playlists didn’t support podcasts yet, but the issue was resolved after updating the app.