# AI Strategy Shifts in Dating, Music, and Assistants

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-02-05

## Transcript

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Alexa Plus is now available to everyone in the U.S.
I'm Imran Sheikh, and your daily crunch for Thursday, with three big tech headlines and a little bit of startup news.
Starts right now.
Tenders turning to a new AI-powered feature, chemistry, to help it reduce so-called swipe fatigue.
A growing problem among online dating users who are feeling burned out and are in search of better outcomes.
Introduced last quarter, the Matchowned Dating app said that chemistry leverages AI to get to know users through questions and, with permission, access their camera role on their phone to learn more about their interests and personality.
On March's Q4 2026 earnings call, one analyst from Morgan Stanley asked for an update on the product's success so far.
Well, Match CEO Spencer Raskoff noted that chemistry was still only being tested in Australia for the time being, but said that the feature offered users an AI way to interact with Tinder.
He explained that users could choose to answer questions to then get just a single drop or two rather than swiping through many, many profiles.
In addition to chemistry's QA and camera role features, the company plans to use the AI feature in other ways going forward AI comes as Tinder and other dating apps have been experiencing paying subscriber declines, user burnout, and declines in new signups.
On Wednesday, Spotify announced changes to its built-in song lyrics feature, which includes making lyrics translations globally available, offering the ability to view lyrics when offline, and relocating the feature in the app.
The changes follow other tweaks the streamer has made to lyrics over the years, hoping to leverage the feature as a tool to push free users to become subscribers.
That began with Spotify trying to paywall lyrics all the way back in 2024, before loosening its grip later in the year after numerous complaints.
Well, now the company hopes that the new offline lyrics feature, which will only be offered to premium subscribers, could encourage users to upgrade.
In the new experience, lyrics will also be relocated, so they appear directly beneath the album artwork or the short, looping video that plays alongside the music.
Now, Spotify says it chose to move lyrics to this more prominent position after user tests suggested it increased engagement with the feature.
It's still possible to share favorite lyrics snippets to social media from the now playing view, the company noted.
This feature, which Spotify called Lyric Previews, will roll out globally to both free and paid customers on the iOS and Android apps for smartphones and tablets.
In addition, lyrics translations, which were first introduced even further back in 2022, will now be globally available.
That's an expansion from the 25 markets supported last year.
When translations are available, you can tap the translate icon on the lyrics card to see the translation appear beneath the original lyrics.
The translation will default to whatever your device's language is set to, Spotify says.
Alexa Plus, Amazon's upgraded generative AI-powered version of its Alexa Assistant is available to all U.S.
customers as of Wednesday.
The company said that the AI feature will be free to prime members across devices.
And meanwhile, anyone can use Alexa Plus for free via the Alexa website or mobile app, with some limitations.
Announced last year, Alexa Plus is model agnostic, meaning it runs on a combination of Amazon's own foundation models and those from other companies, allowing the assistant to do more than the basic tasks of its predecessor using whatever AI technology is best for the job.
As an AI assistant, Alexa Plus can carry on natural language conversations that include follow-up questions and back and forth chat.
In addition to performing smart home tasks, scheduling timers, or offering news and weather, as before, the new assistant can do most things that other AI chatbots can do, like planning an itinerary for a trip, updating a shared calendar, finding and saving recipes to a library, making movie recommendations, helping with homework, exploring a topic, and much more.
Plus integrations with services like Ticketmaster, Thumbtack, Uber, Angie, Expedia, Square, Yelp, Fodors, Open Table, and Suno will allow Alexa to perform more complex tasks, like scheduling a dinner reservation or requesting an Uber ride.
Amazon has not yet shared user adoption numbers on this more agentic use case, where the AI acts autonomously to complete tasks for the AI helper.
During its year-long beta testing period, Alexa customers had the option to try the AI feature or roll back to the prior version.
The company tells TechCrunch, the option to revert to the old Alexa will continue to be available, but couldn't say for how long.com.
Hey, Berlin.
Wusst du thatemostrom richtig was bewegen kannst?
Denn je mehr den Ökostrom der Berliner Stadtwerke beziehen, desto mehr können wir gemeinsam für unsere Stadt tun.
Denn die Berliner Stadtwerke investieren direkt hier vor Ort in eine saubere Stromversorgung.
Berliner Stadtwerke.
Good for dich.
Good for Berlin.