On their 2021 album The Beautiful Liar, the platinum-selling band X Ambassadors explore what happens when you listen to your dark side – which, in the album’s storytelling, is a nefarious character called the Shadow. In partnership with the band and Microsoft, we brought the Shadow to life as an AI-powered interactive voice, giving fans the opportunity to have the Shadow live inside their heads, too, through a personalized and wholly new kind of technology-driven music experience, featuring a “voice assistant” unlike any other. Our browser-based experience appears at first like an X Ambassadors lyric video. But at key moments in the video, the “tape” stops, the comically sinister eyes of the Shadow take over the screen, and the Shadow voice begins a conversation – facilitated by Azure Speech-to-Text technology – that teases out exclusive content covering the song’s themes and backstory.