I’m riding in the back of a Waymo that’s autonomously navigating the busy streets of San Francisco with relative ease thanks to 29 external cameras, six radar, and five lidar sensors all feeding into an AI model. For just 15 bucks, I get to experience what feels like a miracle of modern technology, and yet, there’s a nagging thought I can’t shake.
The music sucks in here.
Waymo’s music-streaming feature has felt like an aged barnacle attached to a futuristic shell. Until this week, passengers were limited to a few music stations that played lo-fi beats, smooth jazz, K-pop, or other genres they may or may not care for. For those who wanted to listen to something more specific, they had to use another app from Waymo’s parent company Alphabet.
For iPhone users, that meant downloading the Google Assistant app and configuring it to connect to Spotify. At that point, you had to ask Google Assistant through written or verbal commands to stream certain songs, artists, or playlists on the Waymo. Even if you get to this point — at which you may be halfway to your destination and have listened to approximately three lo-fi beats — the service didn’t work reliably.
As I rode along in a robotaxi full of cutting-edge technology, I was puzzled why Waymo had not figured out a simple way to stream music from my phone into the car’s speakers — a breakthrough that automakers and audio manufacturers figured out a couple of decades ago.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised this week to see that Waymo launched a Spotify integration allowing users to seamlessly link the music-streaming and robotaxi-hailing ser …