found this discussion as this same problem with my Beam/Alexa and LG tv is driving me CRAZY. How did they not fix this yet?

We recently bought an Arc, same issue. While TV/music is at a comfortable volume level, Alexa is super quiet and we can’t hear her. When turn up Alexa, the TV volume explodes. Issue still persists after 2 years, sadly!

Same issue here… how is this still an issue?!?!?!?

Same here with arc and lg oled

Same issue with the arc on a Sony TV

Any solution for this yet? 

I just want the option to increase the volume on Alexa. Seems an easy solution? (But I understand that Sonos and Amazon don't totally get along as they have competing speakers.)

Same problem: Alexa is barely audible on my Sonos Beam. This is unacceptable, to the point that marketing the Alexa compatibility for this device is a wrong information, for the voice assistant is practically unusable.

100% agree with all, here, this is ridiculously annoying. We love our sonos, but we used Alexa announcements etc to reach the kids in other rooms. Now impossible to do that.

2 years and no fix! Cannot hear Alexa from 6” away!

Same issue on:

Sonos Beam Gen 1 

Era 100

Era 300

Sonos Arc

Ridiculous. Hire better Software Engineers.

Same issue.  Come on Sonos, fix this please. 

I’ve been experiencing this issue for years. It’s so frustrating. I’ve missed work due to the alarm being too low. I’m not going to be purchasing anymore Sonos products at this point. 

Experiencing this as well with my Era 300. I think what is fundamentally missing is that it's very possible you may want your voice assistant coming out of one speaker to be at a different volume than your music coming from the entire system. 

Leaving some negative reviews on their products where I bought them. They can't claim to have voice assistants when it's this dysfunctional. This may be the only way to get them to listen.

So, I have recently been told by a former Sonos employee that the problem is probably never going to be fixed. I was told that the core of the Sonos software was written long before there was an idea of personal assistants, and that, while the issue seems trivial to fix, it is not because it requires modification of the core.  They have apparently looked at a couple of other ways of doing this, but none of them worked in a satisfactory manner - and they are not about to mess with the core because it’s worked well, and they are not about to do anything to jeopardize the basic functionality. I was also told that the problem varies in its severity depending upon the particular TV the Sonos is connected to and that it is highly variable even within TV brands. This makes sense because a TCL TV I had previously was horrible, but my Sony seems to almost work well. And we all know that the real root of the problem is money – they are not willing to make what apparently would be a substantial investment in software development, and testing to fix a problem that a lot of people apparently don’t notice 🤨

@JoeAug, 

That makes sense to me, if what you were told is true. It’s probably easier to add the Alexa voice assistant to a nearby HT surround (if compatible surrounds are in use), or just add an echo Dot nearby instead. The latter are often a ‘steal’ anyway whenever Amazon have their sales.

I have tried adding an actual Amazon Alexa a couple of times, but I can’t seem to get the sound from the Sonos to “duck”. I think it is now possible to add the Sonos to Alexa speakers as a group, so I need to look at that again, but I just have not been able to make the separate Alexa solution work reliably because the TV sound overwhelms it

Just place the Alexa components in the first or second section of the Alexa ‘enabled’ group to duck their audio -see attached example of a Group from the Alexa App.

Spoke with Sonos support and they've been able to repro this issue, but said it won't get prioritized for resolution until more users file tickets complaining about it.  

Moderator Note: Recorded and removed Case number. Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

After having Sonos and hitting this issue I now know where Sonos stands for!

So-not-steady

Unbelievable that you have and advertise with built in alexa and it is cpuple with sound volume!!!

Unusable this way!

Recently switched from Fire TV’s to SHIELD TV’s and for whatever reason SHIELD has a higher baseline volume, so now Alexa is completely inaudible when the TV is at a comfortable level.

This was always an irritation but now Alexa is literally unusable, fantastic.

Don’t know how it happened. Told Alexa “ I can’t hear you” and the volume matches my TV set volume. This doesn’t feel like a fix, and frankly I am still in disbelief it worked, but I am curious if anyone else has something similar happen. Listed below is the set-up.

Sonos Arc, Amazon Fire TV Cube, Spectre TV

Switching to audio pcm fixed the problem after many months of struggling with this. Thank you for your feedback.