Question

Alexa Repeats What She Is Going To Do But Most Of The Time It Doesn't Reach Sonos + Only Seems To Play 1 Track Then Stops

  • 25 November 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 482 views

Userlevel 3
Badge +7
Hi,

I am having two major issues with the Alexa Sonos integration:

1) Most of the time, despite Alexa recognising my command correctly nothing reaches my Sonos players. I often have to repeat my command 2 or 3 times before anything starts playing. Alexa will say "x by the b playing on player" after I give it the command but a lot of the time nothing plays.

2) When I do eventually get an album, artist or station playing via Alexa it always seems to stop playing after the first track.

Are these known issues or is there something wrong with my setup? I had lots of difficulties getting set up initially as discovery kept on finding both my players and my parents players. My parents inherited some players from myself so they had the same household id as myself. Eventually I think I managed to get their players associated with their own Sonos account I think. I'm wondering if my account is somehow still associated with their players and that I am having issues as I originally had two kitchens, two living rooms etc. under devices in the Alexa app? It looks ok now in the Alexa app though. That would explain the random nature of commands working/not working.

I am using Amazon music but I would love Alexa to be able to control Google Play Music as I have a large library of my own music that I can listen to for free with Google Play. I resent having to pay a yearly + monthly subscription in order to play the huge volume of music I already own. I find I don't listen to enough new music to warrant paying these subscription fees. I also have all my music on my NAS so I was very disappointed to learn that music could not be called up to play from my own local library via Alexa.

Another huge disappointed, no details of what is currently playing in the Sonos app and no use of the queue. I can understand why the queue is not used as "shuffle my library" would require the entire library to be added to the queue which would obviously take a long time. We really need a special play mode that gradually adds more tracks to the queue as playback gets close to the end of the queue. That way quick load times but the user is still able to shuffle their entire library and see/adjust what's coming up next. Have a look at how Google Play has an upcoming queue of about 20 tracks that is gradually added to as it becomes exhausted.

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3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +20
Hi,

I am having two major issues with the Alexa Sonos integration:

1) Most of the time, despite Alexa recognising my command correctly nothing reaches my Sonos players. I often have to repeat my command 2 or 3 times before anything starts playing. Alexa will say "x by the b playing on player" after I give it the command but a lot of the time nothing plays.


Hi DarrenLink

There are two main reasons for this to happen:

1/ You may need to reset your Voice Control set-up. Please follow the actions I've listed in the answer in this thread:
https://en.community.sonos.com/amazon-alexa-and-sonos-229102/sonos-one-not-responding-to-alexa-comands-6793239

2/ There is an Amazon account cross linking issue. Have you have another app logged into a different Amazon account on your device?


I had lots of difficulties getting set up initially as discovery kept on finding both my players and my parents players. My parents inherited some players from myself so they had the same household id as myself. Eventually I think I managed to get their players associated with their own Sonos account I think. I'm wondering if my account is somehow still associated with their players and that I am having issues as I originally had two kitchens, two living rooms etc. under devices in the Alexa app? It looks ok now in the Alexa app though. That would explain the random nature of commands working/not working.


Can you open the Alexa App on a PC via https://alexa.amazon.co.uk and selected Smart Home>Devices and checked if the duplicate devices are listed? If so, scroll to the bottom and select 'Forget All' and then 'Discover' (WARNING: If you have set-up Routines within the Alexa app, this will delete ALL actions in ALL Routines!)

Let us know if this resolves the issue.
Userlevel 3
Badge +7
Thank you so much. I have resolved the issue with your help. Before I saw your response I renamed "Kitchen" to "Our Kitchen" and "Living Room" to "Our Living Room". This temporarily resolved the issue but when I changed them back to their old names the issue resurfaced. Just having all my mums devices disabled within the Alexa app on my phone didn't help, even when I had renamed them to "Mum A", "Mum B", "Mum C" etc.

The big help was providing the https://alexa.amazon.co.uk link as this allowed me to completely forget my parents devices. I couldn't do that through my Alexa app on my phone. To ensure I disabled the correct players (i.e. my parents) I temporarily renamed my players that had a name clash and this allowed me to get it right. Now I only see my players and everything is working as expected.

Thank you for your help. Glad it was just a setup issue in the end.

Now I just need Google Play support so I'm not required to pay out subscription fees to listen to music that I own.
Userlevel 7
Badge +20
Great news 🙂