Amid all the industry conversation about how smart speakers will affect the way people listen to music, the assumption has been that the music in question will be made by humans.

Here’s a new Alexa skill to make you think, though. It’s called DeepMusic, and has just launched for Alexa-powered devices like the Echo speakers.

“DeepMusic is an Alexa skill that enables you to listen to songs generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Each song was composed entirely using AI. The songs were generated using a collection of audio samples and a deep recurrent neural network. There has been no post-production editing by a human,” explains its description on Amazon’s store.

AI was also used to create the artwork shown on the screen-equipped Echo Show and Echo Spot speakers. The skill can be tested by saying ‘Alexa, open DeepMusic’ and then commands like ‘Alexa, ask DeepMusic to play a song’.

We’ll let you judge for yourself how good those songs are, although this comment from an early tester on Reddit made us hoot this morning: “Lol this makes better music than most of my friends on SoundCloud do…”

Stuart Dredge