Alexa voice only comes from one Sonos One in pair

  • 16 September 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 49 views

Alexa plays music between both speakers just fine. If I ask you a question, though, it only comes out of one speaker. Is there a way to make the Alexa voice come out of both speakers at once?


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2 replies

No there isn’t - normally the speaker that picks up your voice instruction, is the one that responds (assuming Alexa is installed on both).

This is generally a good idea. Alexa’s reply will usually come from the closest, strongest speaker -- even if the path difference is only a couple feet between “Rooms”. If this was not the case you could easily have more distant Rooms responding, for example: a Kitchen and a Bedroom on opposite sides of a doorway or wall. From time to time I do notice that the “bong” might be emitted from multiple Rooms or a SONOS Room and a DOT. I speculate that the wake word (“Alexa”) is locally recognized by each device and they all “bong” while the request is sent to the Cloud with a timestamp. (sound travel is pokey at about one foot per millisecond) The Cloud needs an instant to receive and sort the timestamps then decide which Room should handle the forthcoming Alexa reply. This is not a perfect scheme because a local network delay or a delay in communication with the Cloud could cause a temporary delayed or missed request from one or more Rooms.