Amazon Dot and Play 5 line in going quiet when replying from Alexa

Perhaps Community Manager @Ryan S could amend the 'Best Answer' to include Stephen G's workaround although if @Tangochile is correct and Alexa keeps adding it back then maybe the best thing is to remove the long awaited and keenly anticipated Sonos Skill until it better integrates. :(

The Alexa app recently updated some of the control features for smart home devices and they added an automatic device discovery. I believe every 2 hours, your Alexa devices automatically check for new devices. Which means if you forget the player with the line-in, it'll get re-discovered regularly.

Ducking is being worked on though, so we'll see how this changes in the future.

Thank you so much! That was driving me nuts!!!

@marcoecheverria, that'll kind of come down to how you want to be using your Sonos with Alexa. With the Sonos skill, you can use voice and the controller app together seamlessly, something that's hard to do with the line-in route. You can't mix groups of Echo speakers and Sonos speakers, so the Sonos One can't group with the Dot, but you can group the PLAY:5 and your Sonos One. However, you could have a group of Sonos players all playing the line-in, you just don't have much control through the Sonos app of what's on.

Ducking is something that's being worked on, so I'd expect to see some changes there which might really improve your experience with the line-in Dot connection. I can't say exactly what that will look like, since it's still in the works, so that's a bit of a grey area. If you want to get all of the audio from your Dot to play on your PLAY:5s, including Alexa's responses, you'll probably want to be disable ducking entirely on the PLAY:5, and I'm not sure if that'll be an option, though we've definitely had the request passed over to the team.

The Sonos One won't duck any of your other players when it's responding, it only ducks the room it's in.

Spotify with voice and the news briefings are also coming too. One great thing with the Alexa integration is it can keep on getting better over time, and we're hard at work on several features with the Amazon teams.

My advice, would be play around with both and see what you're really looking to get out of the integration. What features do you like the most, what are you looking to have access to, and through.

Thanks Ryan for taking the time to reply my post. Sonos One without Spotify and CNN report news is not what I really need (but I need to be fair saying that I kinda knew about Spotify but now that I have it I am finding that I need Spotify more than what I thought). For now, I will continue testing the Sonos One with just the integration with Alexa and Smartthings to control devices. This seems to work pretty well and the sound is great but w/o Spotify (I am paying the service and several accounts for my family) I need to use the free option from Amazon Music. I will wait some weeks but if I don't see progress on the integration I will return the Sonos One and wait until you fix all the problems.

sjsvitenko, there are a couple things I'd like to pin down here. First off, the Sonos One is in the same room as the PLAYBAR and SUB if they're all bonded together as a surround sound setup, so if you're in that room and you say "Alexa" it should all duck down with the current design.

Secondly, when the Dot upstairs hears Alexa, the PLAYBAR will duck (and so will the other players bonded in that room), because the PLAYBAR doesn't know that it has a Sonos One in the room.

One big however though, if you're playing the TV audio on the PLAYBAR, it shouldn't duck at all. If it's playing music or any other source, it would.

Finally, in answer to your question, if you turn off the Alexa Skill for Sonos, the Sonos One will still be able to use skills and basic features, but not control what's playing on Sonos devices. It'd be one of those things where we don't recommend it, and it may have some funny quarks since it's not an intended use. But you're welcome to give it a shot and see what you think.

Ryan S - To confirm I have a Sonos One (love it so far) and echo dots some with line in. If I disable the alexa skill my line in will work (and no ducking problem) and I can still use Alexa with the Sonos One? With the skill disabled how does the One know its my Alexa account?

I like having the Dot on my Play 5 as I have a big room the One won't cut it but I want the flash briefings etc to come out the Play 5. In another room I have the One.

The ducking thing is driving the family mad as we use Alexa a lot and also have Sonos in most rooms.

Will play around today.


sjsvitenko, there are a couple things I'd like to pin down here. First off, the Sonos One is in the same room as the PLAYBAR and SUB if they're all bonded together as a surround sound setup, so if you're in that room and you say "Alexa" it should all duck down with the current design.

Secondly, when the Dot upstairs hears Alexa, the PLAYBAR will duck (and so will the other players bonded in that room), because the PLAYBAR doesn't know that it has a Sonos One in the room.

One big however though, if you're playing the TV audio on the PLAYBAR, it shouldn't duck at all. If it's playing music or any other source, it would.

Finally, in answer to your question, if you turn off the Alexa Skill for Sonos, the Sonos One will still be able to use skills and basic features, but not control what's playing on Sonos devices. It'd be one of those things where we don't recommend it, and it may have some funny quarks since it's not an intended use. But you're welcome to give it a shot and see what you think.

So I have my Dots set up with no physical connection to the Sonos. The Sonos skills are active. When anyone talks to the Dot, any Sonos playing will duck.
The ability to turn this off would be appreciated.
To resolve it for now, I’ve had to turn off the skill. Alexa still knows that the Sonos devices are there, but won’t communicate with them.

It drives me nuts that Sonos engineers refer to the audio jack on the Amazon Echo as a "Line In". It is no such thing. It is a audio line OUT - meaning the Echo is the source of audio and instead of audio playing through it's built-in speaker, it goes OUT to whatever speaker is attached to the LINE OUT!

Could you point to an instance of this? I've only seen the line-in on the Sonos device referred to as a line-in, because that is what it is. Being Sonos representatives, they are Sonos centric, and therefore refer to the method of connecting the line-out on a Dot to the line-in on a Sonos device as "the line-in method".

Likewise. I have the exact same problem on both my CONNECT:AMPs. Is there a fix for this?
There isn't really a fix since it's really performing as intended at the moment. The CONNECT:AMP is supposed to drop its volume and you talk to Alexa so that the microphones can hear you, and you can hear Alexa's reply.

The best workaround would be either to disconnect the line-out on the Dot to your CONNECT:AMP's line-in. Otherwise, you could disable the Alexa skill for Sonos and the ducking would be disabled. However, you wouldn't be able to control Sonos using Alexa anymore.

We're still doing some work on this feature based on feedback, so there will be some changes coming in the future.

Just disabled the skill, since it makes the dot hooked to a Sonos unusable... it was also driving me nuts with the music playing on other sonos randomly going quiet for seemingly no reason. Very disappointed with the way this works.

Adding my vote to allow end users to toggle ducking on/off with the Alexa Sonos Skill. Bought echo dots for the house and enabled the Sonos skill. Every few minutes, Sonos would 'duck' when one of my kids would ask Alexa something in another part of the house. We disabled it and went back to our mobile app to control Sonos. Hopefully this gets resolved soon.