Alexa lowering volume

Listening to The Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 yesterday lunch time and the review of the year. One of the reviews related to Alexa which had recently been introduced so they were trying one in the studio. Even though my Alexa is not in the same room as my Sonos every command resulted in my reduction in the Sonos volume for 30 seconds or thereabouts. I have experienced other times when there has been a volume reduction even though my Alexa has been inactive.

I really hope this is resolved soon. It's so annoying when listening in one room and somebody else is chatting with Alexa in another room.

I agree, I wish I had read these comments before purchasing a Sonos One. I already had 5 other Sonos speakers that I can control easily with my computer or phone. The Sonos One with Alexa doesn't do anything better than the Echo Dot. I thought I would be able to group speakers and have the same song in sync throughout the house or select rooms simply by telling Alexa. Now when I want music in multiple rooms, even when requesting the same song or playlist, the music is not in sync. If the speakers are grouped in the Sonos app, you can't tell Alexa to play music in a specific room, it plays in all rooms that are grouped.

Glad for the functionality so far, but I too vote for being able to tell Alexa which Sonos devices it's near to, to have better focussed ducking.

Add me on to the list of people who hate this feature. We got an Alexa for my daughters room and its gotten to the point where either that Alexa goes or the Sonos skill goes which is very frustrating as I really enjoy using the skill.

I join this growing list of troubled people. I have the Sonos One which was a nightmare to set up but got there in the end. I realise it's difficult to get it perfect but it's full of holes at the moment. Bought my daughter an Echo and she is driving us mad blocking the speakers around the house.

Come on SONOS, I was on the beta and provided this feedback then. Where is the fix for this?

Adding to this request. I just disabled the skill because my kid is in the other room talking to Alexa and ruining my music on the other side of the house. Concept makes sense, but the implementation is terrible.

Sonos really need to provide some kind of update on this. Can't believe there hasn't been anything done or said about this by them. They might as well only support Alexa through the Sonos One if this is their idea of supporting Echo devices with Sonos.

Same issue here, got my Echo Dot setup at the weekend and was really looking forward to being able to voice control my 3 Sonos units rather than trying to find my phone all the time.

But alas, whilst it's good to control each speaker the two things that ruin the experience are the constant volume ducking when in another room, or even in the same room, and also the inability to play music on all speakers via voice control - that should be the main focus of the skill!!

Same issue here. Trying to listen to the news on a Play3 in the kitchen but the kids are constantly telling Alexa to play different songs in the lounge and the volume keeps dipping. Another anyoying bug is that if you do use Alexa to control the Sonos, and you pause the music / tunein using the mute button on the Sonos, pressing the mute button again sometime later (eg next day) the music doesn’t start again. You need to use Alexa or the Sonos app.

Same issue for me as well. I have had my alexa dot plugged into the stereo for 6 months and used it instead of the sonos connect. I tried going back to the sonos with the beta skill but pausing the music across the whole house when a satellite alexa in the gameroom is being bombarded with questions by the 3 year old is a deal breaker. Going back to alexa dot until this is resolved. Very sad about this. Please fix this Sonos!

If you have a router that will allow multiple Wi-Fi's (ie Smith Home Wifi AND Smith Home Wifi 5Ghz) you can set up the kids Echo Dot on the wifi that does not contain the Sonos system and then their interactions with Alexa will not affect your Sonos.

Really bad that Sonos haven't fixed this issue yet with ducking, i've disabled the skill for now and left a 1 star review. Will not re-enable until they fix this. There should be configuration so that if someone in another room is using alexa it does not mute my speaker that I am using in a different room, also it should be possible to enable ducking only in the room alexa is in where the speaker also resides. For example:

Lounge: speaker + alexa - someone talks to this alexa and this speaker mutes, no other speaker in the house mutes.

Why isn't this configurable?

Absolutely agree with all of you. This is completely unacceptable timelines to provide a fix for this "ducking" issue!!!!

I'm guessing no one from Sonos bothers reading their own forums and would like to enlighten their customer's as to why such an absurd delay???

Absolutely agree with all of you. This is completely unacceptable timelines to provide a fix for this "ducking" issue!!!!

I'm guessing no one from Sonos bothers reading their own forums and would like to enlighten their customer's as to why such an absurd delay???

That's a bad guess. Sonos staff comment on the forums all the time.

As far as why this hasn't been fixed yet, Sonos probably hasn't gotten the fix from the Amazon side of things. For all we know, the issue could be entirely Amazon's issue to fix. If Alexa is telling all Sonos units to duck, and doesn't state which echo unit is listening right now, there is no way Sonos could possibly know which speaker to duck. Really, it should be Amazon that looks at it's own group setting and tells Sonos the specific speaker to duck. Otherwise, Sonos would have to maintain it's own link of echo device paired to Sonos room. It makes no sense to main groupings/pairings on the Alexa side and the Sonos side.

I am not crazy about the timeline to get this done either, but I blame Amazon, not Sonos. I can somewhat understand that it's not a high priority issue for Amazon, as fixing it isn't going to sell too many more units for them, and most customers believe it's Sonos issue to fix anyway.

BTW, I don't think Sonos can officially point the finger at Amazon for this. It's not the best practice to through your integration partner under the bus, even if they may deserve it.

It is 100% on Amazon. They announced this functionality, along with grouping of 3rd party speakers to a single or multiple Echos, will be forthcoming in a new SDK. In 2017, they stated this Multi-Room Music SDK would be "available to device makers building Alexa-enabled products early next year." That SDK has not yet been released.

Well Muti-room music using Echo devices Is here. It's been close to a year since the "beta" of Alexa support. I'm not sure why Sonos can't make the ducking feature configurable (default it to "use ducking" if you'd like) and let users control their experience.

Absolutely agree with all of you. This is completely unacceptable timelines to provide a fix for this "ducking" issue!!!!

I'm guessing no one from Sonos bothers reading their own forums and would like to enlighten their customer's as to why such an absurd delay???

That's a bad guess. Sonos staff comment on the forums all the time.


What I see everyone saying here is that we have not heard anything from Sonos about this issue. Why can't someone from Sonos participate here and say something like "We are working with Amazon to resolve the Sonos ducking issue when using Echo, and work is actively being done on both sides to address this, and our plan is to have this resolved in 3 months"? How difficult would that be to acknowledge the problem and then let the community know that Sonos cares about their customers and is working on a resolution with Amazon and what the expected timeframe for resolution is? I don't believe that Sonos and Amazon have an arms-length relationship given the SonosOne/Echo integration.

Well Muti-room music using Echo devices Is here. It's been close to a year since the "beta" of Alexa support. I'm not sure why Sonos can't make the ducking feature configurable (default it to "use ducking" if you'd like) and let users control their experience.

But multi-room music using 3rd party speakers is not. Hence the need for the new Amazon multi-room music API.

Well Muti-room music using Echo devices Is here. It's been close to a year since the "beta" of Alexa support. I'm not sure why Sonos can't make the ducking feature configurable (default it to "use ducking" if you'd like) and let users control their experience.

But multi-room music using 3rd party speakers is not. Hence the need for the new Amazon multi-room music API.

OK I understand that, but Sonos could at least provide a control to disable the automatic ducking. That is probably one of the most annoying features of the Sonos Alexa skill and is a deal breaker for me.

I started this post when alexa was first realeased for Sonos and in seven months no one from sonos has posted any form of reply. The most sensible post so far is that in the sonos skill you can tag your speaker to a specific Alexa and it only drop the speaker, speakers that are connected.

Strangely the play bar and play bass and play ones on the tv do not drop the volume when you summon Alexa.... so it can be done.....

Sonos a response please....??

Same issue here, i have 4 Alexa devices in rhe house and when the kids talk to them the music in the living room is lowered! That is very annoying. Sonos: please sort this out as it is a really pointless Alexa skill at the moment.