Sonos and Alexa - Ducking

Ducking- Hi is there any signs of a resolution to the ducking problem as it is really annoying. Got three Echo dots for me and the kids for Christmas adnd someone is forever asking alexa a question and everyone else's experience of Sonos is affected. Please help soon otherwise it is going in the cupboard until sorted!

No timescale for this to be addressed yet but Sonos have agreed to investigate. My personal view would be to use Alexa Groups and only devices within that group would duck.

Even better advice >> Amazon & Sonos fix this faux pas so we dont waste time on work arounds that were not really designed for this. In the interim you could just as add an option to enable / disable 'ducking' >> simples

Exact same issue as OP here. I disabled the skill essentially turning my dots into islands and the sonos one into a Play 1. I’ve got over $1500 in sonos in the house so this really blows.

I too have multiple echo devices and Sonos devices throughout my home. If I am listening to music on the Sonos in one room and someone activates an echo device in any other room the sound on the Sonos on all rooms lowers. So they call it volume ducking. I don't mind if I ask Alexa something and the room I am in volume ducks down but it gets irritating if my wife is adding items to a shopping list through Alexa in another room and the volume drops on the Sonos I am listening to in another room. There should be a way to link a sonos to particular room or echo? I hope they can get this resolved soon. I like the convenience of telling Alexa what song to play where but may have to disable the skill to keep my sanity.

Tech support replied back to me that they would forward it on toe the software developers and that they will take it into consideration. I consider this a big deal, I would hope they do too. 😠

Sonos said their plan once Amazon makes it available is to be able to link Alexa device to Sonos speaker - so that only that Sonos speaker ducks. Right now they all duck. The only way to make a speaker not duck is to remove it from the Alexa app.

So lets say you have a Sonos speaker in kitchen you want voice control but the living room you don't want to duck. Delete the Living room from the Alexa app. You will have voice control of kitchen but you won't have voice control of living room (but it won't duck).

That is only work around right now.

I hope this gets fixed some time soon. I have 10 zones at my house for Sonos and I use a lot of home automation and a lot of voice commands. The wife was originally nonplussed by the behavior of her music pausing in another room from me, but now, she's reached annoyance level.

Gotta say a simple on / off solution would make a lot of users (and their spouses!) very happy! It can't amount to more than a handful of new coding. Then rollout a more sophisticated solution in Sonos own sweet time. It would beat having to remove the skill entirely to stop the extremely annoying system wide ducking. I hope whomever is in charge of this aspect of the Sonos ecosystem has had a flea in their ear! It's the sort of mistake a noob would make.

If it was ever going to be fixed, it would be fixed already. Its just another example of the error Sonos made in the way they chose to integrate with Alexa, and are utterly beholden to Amazon for everything. Sadly it is not in Amazon's interest to fix any of this.

Disagree - Sonos had publically stated they are working on and Sonos would not publically state anything unless they were planning it. There is a Sonos update coming this week - maybe it will be included (we don't know yet).

Why would it not be in Amazon's interest - they are creating partnerships to help make Alexa the voice assistant of choice (they have a lot riding on the expansion of Alexa into other devices).

ie - I disagree with about everything in the statement.

Sonos has also stated they plan to have ability for Alexa to group rooms - that one seems more complicated so I do not expect that near term (which I define as next 30 to 60 days). I do expect ducking fix near term.

I seriously doubt that Sonos could do anything about this, even as far as turning off ducking. The logical implementation of this is that Alexa tells Sonos to mute all music without telling Sonos why, probably not even what echo gave the command. Therefore, if Sonos turned off ducking, they would have to turn off the mute command entirely...and people would then complain about that.

I do think this is something on Amazon's radar, but I don't think it's high on their priority list. For one thing, customers who are unhappy with the feature seem to blame Sonos, not Amazon for the issue. This thread and many others are good examples of that trend. Customers are not going to react by buying less from Amazon, so why exactly does Amazon care? However, fixing the ducking feature should be good PR for Amazon, so I do think they have an interest in fixing it. There are surely other things to fix that give better PR for Amazon though.

I'd say the best thing Sonos can do to improve the integration with Amazon is to get the integration with Google out the door. Competition will drive improvements to both integrations.

Again disagree and being Sonos has said priority from day one I would expect fairly soon. Sonos doesn’t publically mention anything unless they are actively working on.

It's hard to know who to blame, Amazon or Sonos. However, Amazon have provided a way to group Alexa and Sonos devices (at a device level, NOT audio!) since November last year, so SOMETHING knows that an Alexa device and a Sonos wireless speaker are in a device group... It would seem odd that Amazon would provide such function but then not externalise that information to third party developers... Again this is not audio grouping, just Alexa smart device groups that allow Alexa to limit control of things like "Turn lights on" to just devices in that group... Seems like a small jump for Amazon and Sonos to limit ducking to any Sonos devices defined in such a group...

Here’s my workaround. Disable the Sonos skill in Alexa App. Connect a Bluetooth Receiver to the line input of your Sonos Play 5, Sonos Connect or Connect Amp. Enable Autoplay on the Sonos device. Pair the BT receiver to your Echo Dot and it will ‘duck’ and play in the selected Sonos group, without affecting any other Sonos devices.
This workaround has the advantage that when Echo Dot is disconnected from BT Receiver, you can use BT to play BBC Podcasts and older material directly from your phone via your Sonos system.
Hope this helps some other users.
Melchet.

That's a ridiculous solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. Unless Amazon expect you to have multiple Alexa devices in the same room, it's a tiny amount of code to allow 1:1 relationships between sonos devices and the Alexa device in the same room.

Ducking- Hi is there any signs of a resolution to the ducking problem as it is really annoying. Got three Echo dots for me and the kids for Christmas adnd someone is forever asking alexa a question and everyone else's experience of Sonos is affected. Please help soon otherwise it is going in the cupboard until sorted!

No timescale for this to be addressed yet but Sonos have agreed to investigate. My personal view would be to use Alexa Groups and only devices within that group would duck. How do you set that up as that might be a short term fix

No timescale for this to be addressed yet but Sonos have agreed to investigate. My personal view would be to use Alexa Groups and only devices within that group would duck. How do you set that up as that might be a short term fix

He wasn't saying using Alexa Groups is a short term fix, he was saying that would be the method to use for the coming long term fix. Right now, there is no way to use Alexa Groups with Echos and Sonos for either the ducking feature or for actual grouping, the only "fix" for ducking is to disable the Alexa skill.