Alexa announcements not working from routines

  • 14 January 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 874 views

Alexa routines work fine to play music from one Sonos speaker or let Alexa say things like the time on a given speaker. But I cannot get this to work multi-room. The Alexa announcement feature is meant to let Alexa say something on all speakers, and it indeed works across Sonos and Echo Dot when activated by voice command – but not if I activate an announcement through an Alexa routine (although I can select Sonos and Amazon devices here).

Has anyone been able to make this work?

Thanks!


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3 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +16

Hi @FelixR, Thanks for reaching out, and welcome to the community. Sorry to know about this issue on your Sonos system. Upon checking with our specialists, Multiroom is Alexa devices working with Sonos or multiroom to Sonos is not yet integrated to Sonos as these are 2 different protocols for Alexa enabled speakers and third party Voice Assistant speakers such as Sonos. We’ll have this checked with our team for updates about this feature. You may check this thread link for more information about this concern. 

Let us know how it goes and we're here to answer any further questions you have.

Thank you Simon

It is quite odd and very inconsistent that the announcements feature does work in a multi-room type fashion, i.e. on all speakers across Echo and Sonos at the same time, when I activate the announcement feature by voice, but that it is not possible to activate that same feature from within an Alexa routine.  

There may be all sorts of complex engineering reasons for this, but ultimately, for me as a consumer, it should “just work” and “if you start the feature this way, it works, but if you start the same feature that way, it won’t work” is just bad customer experience.

Never mind.

Userlevel 6
Badge +16

Hi there @FelixR, thansk for the update. Thanks and we appreciate the feedback about this feature. I’ll make sure that I’ll pass on your feedback internally with our team. If you have any questions or run into any other issues, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are always happy to assist you.