Spotify is giving its audiobook experience another upgrade, rolling out three new features designed to make finding your next listen a little less painful.

The headline addition is Prompted Playlist for Audiobooks, which lets you describe what you’re looking for in plain language and have Spotify build a personalised list of audiobook recommendations.

It’s joined by a conversational search feature that lets you actually ask Spotify questions about books, along with some much-needed improvements for anyone working their way through a series.

Tell Spotify what you want to read

Prompted Playlist has already appeared across Spotify’s music and podcast offerings, and audiobooks are next in line.

Rather than digging through categories or relying on generic recommendations, you can type out something reasonably specific and let Spotify do the hunting.

For example, you could ask for critically acclaimed books that have received screen adaptations in the past few years. Or you could get considerably more particular and ask Spotify to build a month-by-month audiobook calendar, limiting each selection by length and matching the books to your listening habits.

The recommendations draw on both your personal tastes and what’s currently trending, and playlists can be set to refresh daily or weekly.

Prompted Playlist for Audiobooks is currently rolling out in beta to eligible Premium users in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Sweden.

There are usage limits while Spotify tests the feature, so don’t expect completely unfettered access just yet.

You can also have a chat with Spotify

Spotify is also expanding its conversational search capabilities across music, podcasts and audiobooks.

Instead of entering a search term and hoping for the best, users can type or speak naturally to Spotify and follow up with additional questions.

That could mean asking for some Scandinavian noir ahead of a trip to Sweden, getting recommendations based on something you’ve already enjoyed, or even asking a question about the book you’re currently listening to.

Spotify says the system understands follow-up questions and can move between music, podcasts and audiobooks during the same conversation.

There is a fairly substantial catch for Australians, though: we don’t get this one yet.

The conversational Spotify experience is initially available in English for eligible Premium subscribers aged 18 and over in the US, Ireland and Sweden.

Given Prompted Playlist is already reaching Australia, hopefully we won’t be waiting too long.

## Series finally get some proper organisation

The least flashy of Spotify’s three changes might also be one of the most useful.

Finish an audiobook that belongs to a series and Spotify can now recommend the next instalment immediately.

Multi-book series are also being labelled as such, with dedicated series pages showing the correct reading order. Author profiles will similarly let you browse the different series an author has written.

It sounds obvious, but anyone who has stared at a fantasy series with six books, three novellas and a prequel wondering what on earth comes next will probably appreciate it.

Unlike conversational search, the new series features are available in Australia, alongside the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Sweden.

DRN’s take

Spotify has spent years teaching us to expect increasingly personalised music recommendations, so bringing the same thinking to audiobooks makes plenty of sense.

Prompted Playlist is particularly interesting. Audiobook discovery can be surprisingly clunky when you don’t already know what you want, and being able to ask for something as specific as “a funny sci-fi audiobook under ten hours” is potentially far more useful than scrolling through another collection of vaguely related titles.

The series improvements aren’t revolutionary, but they’re the sort of quality-of-life feature that should have been there already.

Conversational search could ultimately be the most ambitious of the three, particularly if Spotify can reliably answer questions about the book you’re listening to without wandering into spoiler territory.

Unfortunately, Australians will have to wait to find out.

For now, Prompted Playlist and better series navigation give local audiobook listeners a couple of useful new toys to play with.