odd setup problem with Roam/alexa

  • 24 June 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 137 views

Hi

I have a beam and a few sonos 1’s (1 voice 5 not) I added a roam to the system setup went perfect and alexa responded from the roam .. great ! Problem was the roam would not respond to any voice command that was sonos related ( e.g play radio) but would respond to native amazon commands (e.g what’s the weather ) None of the fixes on here worked at all my roam was brain dead !

Now the fix is real interesting and may only affect a few sonos users as this was a sort of Amazon issue 

I have 2 amazon accounts and use the switch account command on alexa to switch between the two accounts (different shopping lists etc), Sonos Beam supports the switch account function great ! However this is where the problems could start :-

if you try to set up the roam while the beam is in the different account to the one you normally use with sonos the above error occurs ( brain dead roam). The fix is :-

  1. deregister the failing device in the alexa app
  2. delete the failing device in the alexa app
  3. remove the voice assistant for the failing device in the sonos app
  4. make sure the beam/sonos 1 is set to the correct amazon account (use switch account)
  5. re add the voice assistant to the failing device via the sonos app

After this everything works as expected. The odd things about this are the sonos device which is in the secondary account works correctly (my beam & sonos 1 support this feature).

My roam does not support the switch account command  (alexa responds with I can not do that right now) which may be related to the original issue.

To date I have not deleted either my beam or 1 from my amazon account, switched to the secondary amazon account & tried to re add the removed device ( I just don’t have the time to mess about doing this) to find out if the issue is there with sonos alexa devices that support the switch account command suffer with the same issue my guess is they will.

using the switch account command (on supported devices) after setting up the new device does not affect the new device at all. 

moral of the story is make sure your devices are in the amazon account that sonos knows about before you add alexa to another device  


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1 reply

Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @Jimr1 

Thanks for your post, and for sharing your experience!