LG’s excellent new Bluetooth speaker is getting a ‘culturally rich’ AI DJ on-device, so you can make requests and ask questions about the music

FYI.RAiDiO is available on the LG xboom range
AI personas to help you dive deeply into the details
“Culturally intelligent” to be relevant for everyone

Fans of music, AI and random capitalization rejoice: will.i.am’s FYI.RAiDiO is coming to the fantastic LG xboom Grab and the solid LG xboom Bounce speakers – anything that makes this impressive range even more entertaining is a bonus.

FYI.RAiDiO is “not just another streaming service”, we’re told: it uses AI personas that you can interact with in real time. You can find out about the music that’s playing, explore the artists’ back stories, discover if they’re playing near you, or just get lifestyle tips. And according to FYI.RAiDiO, the personas “are designed to reflect diverse cultural perspectives” so your interactions will feel friendly and relevant.

To access the service you can press the MY button on the speaker, or go via the FYI app. Doing so “transforms the speaker from a passive device into a responsive companion that listens, informs, and entertains.”

The LG xboom Bounce by a leafy plant on a shelf. — The xboom Bounce is also getting the new FYI.RAiDiO feature (Image credit: Future)

What’s the plan, will.i.am?

We’ve chatted about AI and music tech with will.i.am this year, and he had some interesting things to say. He told us that AI would make speakers into communicators, with your speaker becoming an “awesome banter companion”.

Instead of having a traditional smart speaker where you tell it what to do and don’t really go beyond that, will.i.am’s vision is of speakers you can have deep conversations with and “dive deep into all the details… it’s going to expand people’s critical thinking.”

FYI stands for Focus Your Ideas, and will.i.am came up with the core proposition during Covid when he was “stuck at home like everyone else.” Frustrated by having to use multiple apps for multiple things just to stay in touch with people, he envisaged a better, AI-powered alternative. What if “you could just network with smart intelligent experts across these different domains but make ’em feel hyper expressive, quasi human-like?”

The radio – or RAiDiO – app is part of that, so rather than seeing it as a stand-alone feature it’s perhaps better to think of it as a preview: today it’s music, tomorrow it could be all kinds of communication.

As will.i.am told us, he wants to scale: with a bit of help from Qualcomm, he wants to “take our solution to more vehicles, more devices, more TVs, more speakers.”