Question

A Sonos One in each kid's room... working via voice command from one Spotify account?

  • 19 December 2017
  • 30 replies
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I have a couple Sonos One's showing up tonight. I'm hoping to put one in each of my kids' rooms (ages 7 & 10), and they'll be able to voice command their way through Spotify content, from a single Spotify account. Explore music! (I was thinking of printing them out sheets of recommendations... albums to explore with explicit voice commands to play them.) I know this should work via Sonos App (I can ask multiple Sonos speakers to play different albums via single Spotify account). But the kids don't have "devices" (like phone or tablet)... so... will it--different Spotify content playing on two Sonos One's--work via the voice commands invoking a single Spotify account (which come, I expect, via Amazon/Alexa). Has anyone tried this by chance? If I get no response, I'll try to return to this thread with my experiences. Thank you!!

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hmmm... it seems to mostly work. the sonoses seem to get a little confused sometimes. like now, when I try to say, "Alexa, pause" or "Alexa, next" to one of the speakers, I only get a "I'm not sure how to help you with that" answer, as though no music were playing (and I can clearly hear it playing!). another time, asking one speaker to do something seemed to cause the other to stop playing. But... 80-90% of the time, it's all doing what I hoped. we'll do some more real world testing later... perhaps on Xmas day. I'm confident this is "good enough" for now, and expect Sonos & Spotify & Amazon to continue to hammer out these (system?) bugs.
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hmmm... it seems to mostly work. the sonoses seem to get a little confused sometimes. like now, when I try to say, "Alexa, pause" or "Alexa, next" to one of the speakers, I only get a "I'm not sure how to help you with that" answer, as though no music were playing (and I can clearly hear it playing!). another time, asking one speaker to do something seemed to cause the other to stop playing. But... 80-90% of the time, it's all doing what I hoped. we'll do some more real world testing later... perhaps on Xmas day. I'm confident this is "good enough" for now, and expect Sonos & Spotify & Amazon to continue to hammer out these (system?) bugs.

This is the behaviour that I expected, I expect it will get worse when both speakers are given commands at the same time and you may find that they will only play a single song and then stop. 😞
I also couldn’t get this to work with Spotify, but interestingly, multiple Sonos Ones with independent voice control works perfectly with Pandora. Add to that the ability to tune Pandora radio stations within the Sonos app and what I perceive as the smartest learning algorithms, I’m about to start giving Pandora Premium my money.
Doh. Works perfectly on the free version of Pandora, I haven’t tried Pandora Premium, but this makes me believe it will not work: https://help.pandora.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1392219-%22someone-else-is-listening-to-your-pandora-account%22

Would be interesting to learn if anyone can confirm. Thanks.
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Wanted to give an update. Now have a Spotify Family plan, with the two Sonos One's set up on unique Alexa/Amazon Accounts linked to unique "children" of the Spotify Family plan. It works at least 90% of the time, perhaps closer to 95% or 98% of the time. the worst thing is occasionally when asked to play a playlist or an album or an artist, only one song is queued up. Although this might be a lingering issue for Sonos One's in general, not constrained to an issue with our more complicated configuration. The kids have a list of albums/artists/playlists/songs they like, and are continuing to add to the list... seems to be a good way to invoke music you like, with the written queues to remind you of what is possible! (kind of like perusing the old CD rack...)