Question

Alexa not discovering my Sonos Play:1

  • 19 November 2019
  • 4 replies
  • 1354 views
L

I have a set of Sonos speakers at home, and they are all connected to Alexa and my echo dots work well at home to control them.

At work, I have one echo dot, and one Play:1.

I *cannot* get the Play:1 at work, to be discovered by Alexa - I follow the instructions to go into the Sonos app on my phone and Add Alexa - it says “Set up your Amazon Echo device to work with Sonos” and there is a “add amazon alexa” button - I click it, and it opens up the Alexa app and takes me to the (already enabled) Sonos Skill page.

I have no option to enable this skill - all I can do is disable the skill or click settings.

Under settings, my only option is to click Manage Smart Home devices - and I get into the endless loop of trying to have Alexa discover devices, fail and try again.

I don’t want to disable the Sonos skill - it took a long time to get all my other Sonos players to connect - I’d hate to have to go through all that again.  Alexa suggests putting my device in “pairing mode” - but I haven’t found any such thing in the Sonos app?

 

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4 replies

melvimbe

Are you using the same Amazon account and Sonos account in both locations?  You would need to setup this up with a separate Amazon and Sonos account at both locations or a pair of account for each locations.  

Actually, you may not be able to do this with a single Amazon and Sonos account.  When discovering Sonos speakers, I belief it will search through the cloud to the Sonos server, that will identify the speakers you have at your home, even if you happen to be at the office at the time.

 

Someone else needs to confirm and chime in about this though.

Danny
A

Do you have another Alexa enabled device with the same name?

If that’s the case you need to rename one of them.

 

--akeh

L

The Sonos at work has a unique name that doesn’t match any other existing Echo dots or other Sonos speakers (or any other smart devices).

I expect that Alexa will always find all the devices - when I open my Alexa app on my phone, even at the office - all my home smart devices are listed.  But I don’t see why I can’t add another device to the list of available devices?   I won’t try to control the home Sonos devices from the office, or control the office Sonos from home - just let me add it to the list of devices Alexa knows about?

L

I found a couple of other year old threads with people with multiple homes running into the same issue (link and link ).  The consensus seems to be “you’re out of luck” unless I want to disable and re-enable the Sonos skill every time I get to work, discover my work Sonos, then disable and reenable the Skill when I get home, to discover the home Sonos-es (sp?)

That’s obviously not a workable solution :)

It’s a bit unclear to me - does anyone know what information is stored in my Alexa cloud account, to identify my devices?  If I took my office Sonos home, hooked it up to the home network, and had Alexa discover it - would it be hooked to an IP address of my home network, or is it using a MAC address to identify the devices?

If Alexa is storing MAC addresses, then if I took the Sonos *back* to the office, presumably Alexa would still recognize it?  But if it’s using IP addresses, the IP range in the office isn’t the same as at home, and Alexa might know about it, but wouldn’t be able to connect to it once I moved the Sonos back to the office.

 

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