After upgrading my Sonos system ran into issue of Alexa not working properly. After consulting the numerous Sonos User Forum posts, trying things suggested, and thinking about my issues finally figured out how to fix it. Thought I would share what I went thru to get it – recognizing that while something fixed it – it is quite possible not everything I did was necessary.
The upgrade: Had a Beam Gen 2, Sub-mini and two Sonos Ones. Replaced Beam (sent it to my son) with an Ultra, kept using the sub mini. Replaced the Ones with two Era 300’s as surrounds. All in the Living Room Group. Moved the Ones to Bedrooms, but now not in the Living Room group. The Ultra in the Living Room controls a Roku TV.
Prior to the upgrade, Alexa worked OK, not great. Occasionally it wouldn’t be able to find radio stations I wanted to stream and same for TV station I wanted to watch.
After the upgrade Alexa got worse. Sometimes Alexa would chime in response and then do nothing. The more I played with disabling and enabling the skill, deregistering and reregistering devices, the worse it got. Finally got to where Alexa would tell me the Sonos skill wasn’t enabled but the iPhone App showed that it was. Had same issue with the Ultra and each of the Ones now working standalone in bedrooms. Every device worked fine using Sonos voice control.
My conclusion was that my Alexa was fouled up (with respect to Sonos) and needed to be reset and started over clean. Apparently, you used to be able to do this from the Alexa web interface – but that capability was removed last Fall – so many of the how to videos on Google about starting over with Alexa are out of date. So, I set about starting over on my own:
- Removed Alexa voice control from each Sonos device.
- Deregistered all Sonos devices from the Alexa iPhone App.
- Disabled the Sonos skill, deleted the Alexa app, shutdown iPhone, powered it back up.
- Reloaded the Alexa app, enabled Sonos skill. Some good news here – I also have some outdoor outlets in Alexa with on/off routines. Those reappeared and were working fine – as they were before I messed things up.
- Then factory reset one of my Sonos Ones (easier to set those up – so wanted to see if I could get one of them working).
- Went thru the Sonos setup. Alexa found it automatically… and then it also found my other Sonos devices and set them up.
- Added voice control to each Sonos device and now it ALL works fine. Tell Alexa on the Ultra or either of the Ones to listen to a radio station or a Pandora station – works fine. Added bonus – now I can tell Alexa (via the Ultra) to watch OTA channel 4.1, 10.3.., Hulu, Pluto… and it pops right up. Doesn’t appear I can tell it to watch a specific thing on Hulu – just gives the home screen.
In retrospect – when I upgraded and moved my old Sonos devices around, I should have removed Alexa voice control from each and deregistered them BEFORE unplugging them. Should have Sonos reset the Beam I was giving to my son and just unplugged it when the green light came on.
Hope this helps somebody…