Amazon remote hard keys compatibility with Sonos

  • 9 April 2018
  • 1 reply
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Hello,

I bought a $30 Alexa remote over the weekend and this little guy is just great.. no more yelling across the room to control Sonos through Alexa. No more yelling across the room to control my home lights through Alexa :)

While the voice activation sent from over the remote works great controlling Sonos, The remote has some hardkeys that unfortunately do not control Sonos.

I would just LOVE if Sonos can work with the Alexa team to make the hard buttons active across the Sonos platform. Considering that Sonos never really had a remote control (except the original Sonos controller that went extinct), it would be super ideal to have a pause button, fast forward/skip or rewind and volume buttons all active on this cool little remote so when pressed Alexa will somehow know the commands are to control the active Sonos system that’s playing music.

Please please won’t the Sonos team work with the Alexa team to implement this feature.. pretty please 🙂

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1 reply

The remote you're referring to is just a bluetooth remote paired to an Amazon echo. When using the voice command feature, your echo passes the command on to the Amazon's cloud servers, which passes it to the Sonos cloud, and then to your Sonos system. The hard buttons on the remote are not interpreted in the cloud, as far as I know...could be wrong about that. In other words, making commands from the hard buttons passed on the cloud would be a big deal. Regardless, it would entirely on Amazon to make that happen either way. It's possible they could do this, but I'm doubtful that it's hign on the priority list. Sonos could pass that requirement on though.

If your system has a playbar, you can get a standard universal remote to control the volume. If you want more control through hard buttons, or don't have a playbar, you could look into getting a Logitech harmony remote, although it will cost a lot more than $30.