Grouping of Sonos Speakers Not Working

  • 19 October 2017
  • 6 replies
  • 2990 views

I have numerous Sonos speakers throughout the house, all with individual names. I have also added them all to a group called "All Speakers". I can get Alexa to control any one speaker individually, but when I try to get her to play the same music on all speakers throughout the house by directing her to play on "All Speakers", she says she understands, but it doesn't work. It just ends up playing on one speaker. Oddly, when I then tell her to stop playing music, and then repeat the request to try playing on all speakers, she will end up playing two different songs on two different speakers.

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6 replies

I cannot get my Sonos group I created to work with Alexa, It will work on individual speakers but not the group I created in Sonsos

I suggest you read the post just above yours, or the one above that.
I have numerous Sonos speakers throughout the house, all with individual names. I have also added them all to a group called "All Speakers".


How did you do this. It's my understanding that Sonos cannot be setup in a named group, either in Sonos or in the Alexa app. Are you sure you didn't create a group of your echo speakers instead?


I can get Alexa to control any one speaker individually, but when I try to get her to play the same music on all speakers throughout the house by directing her to play on "All Speakers", she says she understands, but it doesn't work.


You may want to look in the Alexa app and confirm how the All Speakers group is defined.


It just ends up playing on one speaker. Oddly, when I then tell her to stop playing music, and then repeat the request to try playing on all speakers, she will end up playing two different songs on two different speakers.


That is odd, but I wouldn't spend much effort to fix it. Sonos will tell you there you'll need to define your group of sonos zones through the app, and then you can tell Alexa to play on any one of those zones....it will play on all zones in the group.
Grouping 3rd party speakers is not part of the current Alexa skill, though there is a new Multi-Room Music SDK coming from Amazon early next year that addresses grouping of speakers. Whether the Sonos devices will be able to utilize that SDK remains to be seen.

For now you can group via the Sonos app, then ask Alexa to play to any one Sonos room in the group and it will play to the entire group.
I cannot get my Sonos group I created to work with Alexa, It will work on individual speakers but not the group I created in Sonsos
I would have thought Sonos would have been much further along with the entire integration of Sonos with Alexa when they introduced the Sonos1, but nothing has changed since the initial release of the Alexa Skill. With the multi room grouping now available with the Amazon devices, a $30 Amazon Dot with a good pair of powered speakers (I'm testing a $99 pair right now that's pretty close to the audio quality of my Play 5's) might be a much better option for multi room audio at a fraction of the cost of a new Play 5! I love my Sonos system but there are a few shortcomings that have been around for a long time that have not been resolved, and building new speakers (the Sonos 1) before completing the application integration seems backwards in my mind. Grouping speakers using Alexa should be one of the main skills for Sonos to perform as a whole home system that can be voice controlled!
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Sonos is at the mercy of what Amazon allows them to do. As currently Amazon doesn't let them group with Amazon then that is their limitation.