AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Palumbo, Enrico, Penha, Gustavo, Liu, Alva, Eltscheminov, Marcus, Santos, Jefferson Carvalho dos, Wang, Alice, Bouchard, Hugues, Pampin, Humberto Jesús Corona, Luu, Michelle Tran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Palumbo, Enrico
Penha, Gustavo
Liu, Alva
Eltscheminov, Marcus
Santos, Jefferson Carvalho dos
Wang, Alice
Bouchard, Hugues
Pampin, Humberto Jesús Corona
Luu, Michelle Tran
author_facet Palumbo, Enrico
Penha, Gustavo
Liu, Alva
Eltscheminov, Marcus
Santos, Jefferson Carvalho dos
Wang, Alice
Bouchard, Hugues
Pampin, Humberto Jesús Corona
Luu, Michelle Tran
contents Spotify has recently introduced audiobooks as part of its catalog, complementing its music and podcast offering. Search is often the first entry point for users to access new items, and an important goal for Spotify is to support users in the exploration of the audiobook catalog. More specifically, we would like to enable users without a specific item in mind to broadly search by topic, genre, story tropes, decade, and discover audiobooks, authors and publishers they may like. To do this, we need to 1) inspire users to type more exploratory queries for audiobooks and 2) augment our retrieval systems to better deal with exploratory audiobook queries. This is challenging in a cold-start scenario, where we have a retrievabiliy bias due to the little amount of user interactions with audiobooks compared to previously available items such as music and podcast content. To address this, we propose AudioBoost, a system to boost audiobook retrievability in Spotify's Search via synthetic query generation. AudioBoost leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic queries conditioned on audiobook metadata. The synthetic queries are indexed both in the Query AutoComplete (QAC) and in the Search Retrieval engine to improve query formulation and retrieval at the same time. We show through offline evaluation that synthetic queries increase retrievability and are of high quality. Moreover, results from an online A/B test show that AudioBoost leads to a +0.7% in audiobook impressions, +1.22% in audiobook clicks, and +1.82% in audiobook exploratory query completions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation
Palumbo, Enrico
Penha, Gustavo
Liu, Alva
Eltscheminov, Marcus
Santos, Jefferson Carvalho dos
Wang, Alice
Bouchard, Hugues
Pampin, Humberto Jesús Corona
Luu, Michelle Tran
Information Retrieval
Sound
Spotify has recently introduced audiobooks as part of its catalog, complementing its music and podcast offering. Search is often the first entry point for users to access new items, and an important goal for Spotify is to support users in the exploration of the audiobook catalog. More specifically, we would like to enable users without a specific item in mind to broadly search by topic, genre, story tropes, decade, and discover audiobooks, authors and publishers they may like. To do this, we need to 1) inspire users to type more exploratory queries for audiobooks and 2) augment our retrieval systems to better deal with exploratory audiobook queries. This is challenging in a cold-start scenario, where we have a retrievabiliy bias due to the little amount of user interactions with audiobooks compared to previously available items such as music and podcast content. To address this, we propose AudioBoost, a system to boost audiobook retrievability in Spotify's Search via synthetic query generation. AudioBoost leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic queries conditioned on audiobook metadata. The synthetic queries are indexed both in the Query AutoComplete (QAC) and in the Search Retrieval engine to improve query formulation and retrieval at the same time. We show through offline evaluation that synthetic queries increase retrievability and are of high quality. Moreover, results from an online A/B test show that AudioBoost leads to a +0.7% in audiobook impressions, +1.22% in audiobook clicks, and +1.82% in audiobook exploratory query completions.
title AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation
topic Information Retrieval
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06452