Beam (Gen 2) Alexa suddenly Unreliable

  • 17 January 2022
  • 9 replies
  • 184 views

My system made up of a Sonos Roam and a Beam (Gen 2) in separate rooms. Using Alexa as voice assistant on both devices. Set up was put together over a month ago and has been working fine until one week ago. 
 

Without any change to any physical arrangement or software setting, when trying to use the Alexa wake word on my Beam, The device is having tremendous difficulty. Only hears the weak word and remains activated about 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time is split up:

 

25% of the time the Beam hears the wake  word and the light illuminates for just a fraction of a second before immediately turning off without listening to a command. That is to say it doesn’t even give the speaker a chance to lower the volume and listen so it does acknowledge the weak word it just instantly decides to go back to its regular state without listening to the command.

 

The other 25% of the time my Sonos roam, located in a different room quite far away hears the command and tries to complete the task. 

 

One week ago my system was extremely good at distinguishing between which device should be responding and didn’t have any issues like this.

 

When giving the command to my Beam I am seated at a reasonable distance on my sofa directly in front of it. This issue happens when the Beam is both playing audio as well as totally silent. so I don’t believe residual audio is interfering as the main cause.

 

I have unpaired all devices through both the Sonos and Alexa apps, unregistered all devices, re-registered, reset rebooted in every possible permutation I can conceive of.

 

Still, sitting directly in front of the Beam (less than 6 feet away) it only responds 50% of the time to clear annunciated voice commands. 
 

Any thoughts or insight from the community would be greatly appreciated as this is extremely frustrating and unexpected.
 

 


9 replies

Userlevel 7

Have you tried unplugging the Beam from power for a couple of minutes and rebooting the Roam by following the steps below, followed by rebooting your router?

  1. Disconnect Roam from charging cables and remove it from wireless chargers.
  2. Hold the button on the back of Roam for at least five seconds until you hear the power-off tone and the light above the Sonos logo turns off.
  3. Wait 10 seconds.
  4. Press the button on the back of Roam to turn it back on.

You might also try disabling the Sonos skill in the Alexa app and re-enabling it.

Thank you for the suggestion. Yes, I have unplugged the Beam and let it reset for several minutes a number of times. I have similarly done the restart steps on the Roam as well. Unfortunately, neither of those steps seem to have offered any improvement on either device (that was really the Beam that’s the most troublesome). The Rome is only doing its best to try to help out I think.

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Please see my post here: 

 

Userlevel 1
Badge +1

@hf995 

I am facing the exact same issue on my Sonos Beam 2 speaker. 

 

My other two Ones work just fine

@hf995

I am facing the exact same issue on my Sonos Beam 2 speaker. 

 

My other two Ones work just fine

@03397 

sorry to hear you’re having difficulty as well. But I’m kind of glad it’s not just me. Did your issue start out of the blue after having the beam work perfectly fine for a otherwise long period of time?

 

I wound up spending 2 1/2 hours on the phone with support and they finally agreed to send me a replacement beam. Still hasn’t shipped but I’ll let everybody know if it is a microphone/hardware issue when the new unit arrives.

Userlevel 1
Badge +1

@hf995 

Yes it is like you described. 

All of a sudden. But I do no thing  this is related with hardware. I was facing the same issue with my One and the same way it appeared it disappeared by itself. 

 

 

 

Userlevel 1
Badge +1

Can someone please help on this?

I’m having this exact same issue with my Beam 2. Frustrating.

Userlevel 1
Badge +1

My problem has been solved before the 14.0 upgrade. 

I cannot understand why the problem appeared in the first place and like I said, it was solved by it self. 

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