Alexa ducking - why not fixed with groups?

Hmm... today suddenly the global ducking stopped. Is this finally fixed? Can someone confirm?

Same here. The ducking stopped, although it did everywhere and completely.

Yes, ducking is fixed.

You have to set up groups for all the rooms or locations in your house where you have Sonos products and be sure to assign them ALL to a group. Then ducking works as it should so that it only ducks in the room Alexa was invoked.

The second part of the fix is that you can set your Sonos speakers to be the default music player for a group. So you can just ask alexa to play music in a group and it will play from the Sonos speaker in that group. No need to specify the SOnos speaker name 🙂

Yes, ducking is fixed.


I own two play:5, grouped to a stereo pair. When any Alexa device is talked to the pair will duck. And yes the Sonos are in a group with exactly one echo. For me it is not fixed. Are you sure it is? There were several people saying it's fixed and in the end they realized it was just bugged and was ducking again after a reboot.

Yes, ducking is fixed.


I own two play:5, grouped to a stereo pair. When any Alexa device is talked to the pair will duck. And yes the Sonos are in a group with exactly one echo. For me it is not fixed. Are you sure it is? There were several people saying it's fixed and in the end they realized it was just bugged and was ducking again after a reboot.

Did you specify your Sonos room as the Preferred Speaker inside the Alexa group you created?

Did you specify your Sonos room as the Preferred Speaker inside the Alexa group you created?

Yeah I did that. I did some further tests. It might be a rollout in waves. Ducking works with the Echo in the same room as the Sonos. It won't duck when I use Alexa on my Phone and the echo in the Bathroom. But it will duck when I use the Echo in the living room. Maybe the feature doesn't work with the Dot Gen 2 yet? All Echos are assigned to their own rooms, so that can't be the issue either.

I'm not really sure what this change is, or how it's suppossed to work really. It does seem like changes are being rolled out, or modified in the cloud without us really knowing it.

I don't think it's an issue on what particular model of echo or Sonos device(s) you have, as all this should be happening in the cloud, as I understand it.

Dot Gen 2 works fine for me. Seeky, do you have any Sonos speakers that are not in an Alexa group?

Dot Gen 2 works fine for me. Seeky, do you have any Sonos speakers that are not in an Alexa group?

Nope, just the Play:5 pair. No ducking with Phone and Echo(where it previously ducked), does duck with an Echo Dot in an unrelated room.
I probably shouldn't worry and complain if it still doesn't work next week ;-)

Edit: Seems like the Kitchen Echo heard me and not the one in the Living Room. Thats an Echo Dot Gen1. That one might really not have the update yet.

I think you can force an alexa update by putting the dot on mute.

I think you can force an alexa update by putting the dot on mute.

Must be server side, my Echo and Dot have the same firmware and only one device works as expected.

Managed to get my “ducking” working after speaking with Sonos, basically in order for the speakers to “duck” they need to be included in the Alexa Enabled Group on the app (I didn’t do this and just had them added as the preferred speaker).

In the screenshots below you can see 2 use cases covered:

In the Office I have just the device “Office” added in the group, as well as being set to the preferred speaker:

In the Kitchen (as it is located in an open plan area with the Living Room) I have the preferred speaker set to Kitchen, but in the Alexa group I have both “Kitchen” and “Living Room”:

This gives me the desired result of only the speakers in the Alexa group ducking when invoked via the Alexa device set for that room (e.g. Living Room Echo Spot ducks Living Room and Kitchen).

Hope that helps!

Guy

I found my issue, I forgot to add one Echo to a group, turns out that Echos which arn't in a group duck all Sonos speakers.

Just wanted to chip in with my experience.

Sonos (the company) gets a lot of grief round these parts but they’ve made good on a promise to make my kit (some of it years old) work with Alexa, and now that the ducking issue is fixed it’s amazing. Sonos deserve full marks for this. They don’t get everything right (still think your apps are sucky guys, sorry), but Sonos + Alexa is an awesome combination. Hopefully many of those who said they would stop recommending Sonos can start doing so again!!

Andrew

I agree, Andrew! Sonos and Alexa are great together and the overall multiroom experience unbeaten.

I hope Sonos will keep its momentum and stay around for a long time!