Question

Alexa group speaker command not working

  • 25 November 2018
  • 0 replies
  • 1041 views

I have just got a Beam in my family room to go along with my (non-Alexa) Play 1 in the bedroom. Getting them all to play simultaneously or independently through the Sonos app works fine. Problem comes with Alexa voice control.

Saying 'play spotify through family room' or 'through bedroom' works most of the time (although will sometimes claim that a device is offline when it isnt) but it seems impossible to get them to play the same Spotify song simultaneously in both rooms via Alexa command.

I have the iPhone Alexa app and set up a new 'All Sonos' group (i couldnt select the 'add multi-room speakers' as its greyed out). However when i say 'Play spotify on All Sonos' it will either say i have to add it as a skill and then ask Alexa to discover new devices (its already added as a skill and asking Alexa to discover new devices just leads to 'no new devices could be found'). Occasionally it will start to play and will say 'playing Spotify on All Sonos' but it actually only comes on the Family room. if i change the preferred group speaker to Bedroom it will then play only on the bedroom.

On one occasion i thought id cracked it when Alexa started playing music on both speakers but then it turned out not to be the same track. The family room was what i asked for and ten seconds later it started playing the bedroom speaker but it was a different song (resumed playing the last one i'd played on the Play 1 via the Sonos app)

The nearest i came to getting it to work was when i tried using the Alexa iphone app voice command rather than Alexa through the Beam - it started playing in the family room then a couple of seconds later started in the bedroom too. My celebrations were short lived as about 2 seconds later it stopped in the bedroom again and continued just on the family room. to be honest i'm not even sure what i did to get this brief breakthrough (this is very much like the plot of the film Awakenings)

I know i can just do this manually through the Sonos app but its also incredibly annoying that it doesnt just work via Alexa. The Alexa app has the group function for exactly this scenario then it doesnt actually work.

There seems to be a lot of Alexa-based issues but if anyone has any advice i'd be very grateful - tried all the usual stuff like uninstalling the apps, unlinking then relinking the accounts but nothing seems to work.

thanks

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