I'm thinking this is a limitation setup by Amazon, not by SONOS.

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I'm thinking this is a limitation setup by Amazon, not by SONOS.



It absolutely is. Sonos doesn't process the voice commands, Amazon Alexa does. In other words, Alexa has to understand and vet the request before passing it on to Sonos. If it doesn't understand or rejects the request for whatever reason, it will do so without passing on to Sonos. That's generally the nature of how 'Smart skills' work with Alexa.



Other 'non smart' skills work differently. When you state something like 'Ask Hayward to turn on the hot tub', Alexa doesn't try and figure out what hot tub is or whether or not it can be turned on. It recognizes that you are invoking the Hayward skill and passes the text on to Hayward's servers to deal with. This is actually how my pool control works, but it's annoying that I have to invoke the skill manually and it also means I can't integrate the pool with other smart features in anyway.



So sure, Sonos could have created a non-smart skill, but that would mean that customers would be annoyed with the need to invoke the skill manually. They also would have done all that processing of requests themselves, and they lose the ability to integrate in any sort of smart features (like Alexa cast).



BTW, clearly Amazon doesn't want users requesting Apple music through Alexa, but I imagine Apple doesn't want you to do that either.

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I had the same issue with Apple Music, then realized that Siri was just laying around on the desk doing nothing!



So now I just say "Hey Siri" when I want to play Apple Music through the Sonos One. :)



(And I grouped it with the rest of the Sonos stuff in the bedroom, so now it sounds AWESOME!)



Now I just leave Alexa to tend to her normal duties. "Alexa, what's the weather gonna be like today?" and "Alexa, got any new elephant jokes?"



I'll give her more responsibility when she's ready. 🙂

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Try using IFTTT and setup something like this



use alexa as the if, use the phrase play (playlist) on sonos



use sonos as the then



play (playlist) on (room):D

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Now that Apple Music is available on Alexa (if you live in the US), could someone in the US tell us if it actually works ?

And does anyone know of the roadmap for other countries ?

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Not on Sonos. There are some things to work out on the Sonos side. Spotify took a couple months longer than Amazon Music, I expect Apple Music to be the same. Sonos has stated they are working on it.

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