I have 10 Sonos rooms in my home. I have multiple people living in my home. My daughter is the heaviest user of Alexa. With the Sonos skill enabled, every time she activates Alexa, all the active Sonos speakers go mute.
I have found that I sometimes can not listen to a single song without 8 interruptions while listening on the other side of the house. Ever try watching a show while your child is listening to a different song via Alexa every 30 seconds?
I understand there is no correlation between the Alexa device (Echo Dot) and the room it is located in. As a result, all the speakers go mute in the whole house. However, with the Sonos device that have Alexa built-in, why wouldn't it just mute these devices? Why does it still have to mute the entire house.
I have invested heavily in Sonos over the years and have 17 Sonos devices. I am hesitant to invest in the 'latest' devices like Sonos One or Beam if they will cause a poor user experience. I'm assuming with the Alexa skill disabled, the voice features of these devices will be disabled as well and it won't cause any problems.
The Alexa skill only seems useful if either you have only one person living in the house or one Sonos device, or at least only listen to one Sonos device at a time. Can anyone confirm that if I purchase the Beam and have the Sonos Skill disabled, it will operate the same as the Playbar or Playbase?
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+22Sonos has said they are working on sorting that out so that what we call "Ducking" only happens in the room where the alexa device being spoken to resides.
We are expecting a big update 3rd week of July (with Airplay support). I would be surprised if they don't have the ducking issue sorted out by then. I expect this year we are going to see a good bit of Alexa enhancements (don't know exactly how many in July - - but the ducking issue was the first thing Sonos said they were working to alleviate).
Note: With the Sonos One and Sonos Beam - if you speak to their built in Alexa only that speaker ducks. Sonos One or Beam won't duck other speakers in the house that have the Alexa Skill enabled (as you see when you utilize echos, dots, etc.).
We are expecting a big update 3rd week of July (with Airplay support). I would be surprised if they don't have the ducking issue sorted out by then. I expect this year we are going to see a good bit of Alexa enhancements (don't know exactly how many in July - - but the ducking issue was the first thing Sonos said they were working to alleviate).
Note: With the Sonos One and Sonos Beam - if you speak to their built in Alexa only that speaker ducks. Sonos One or Beam won't duck other speakers in the house that have the Alexa Skill enabled (as you see when you utilize echos, dots, etc.).
+1July has passed. Single room ducking and not having to specify a room every time have not arrived yet. You can assign a Sonos device to an Alexa group tied to a specific Echo device, which is the foundation for solving both of these issues, so I'm surprised that these features aren't available yet. It literally took just 30 minutes to implement this in the echo-sonos git hub project, so very surprised that it is taking this long.
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