Sonos and Alexa in two houses

Are you sure. Did you check under settings ... about my Sonos when connected to each Same Sonos id. They sound opposite.

Huh. I’m stumped.

2 Sonos IDs; 2 Amazon accounts; 1 Amazon "household". How do I avoid irritating the neighbours by leaving the radio on in an empty flat without going through an Amazon "divorce"?

What are you trying to accomplish TreeGuy?

What are you trying to accomplish TreeGuy?

I have Alexa controlling Sonos at my home with an Echo. I'd like to add a Sonos 1 at my parent's place. Can I use my Amazon Prime account at both locations (I know I can't stream Amazon music on both at the same time with my standard Prime account).

In fact this may be more to do with the various rights and restrictions Amazon places on Alexa accounts.

As far as I can tell its not an Amazon restriction because my Echo's work fine from more than one location. Also, I'm able to stream Amazon Prime at both locations, but only one works with Alexa (the other I have to control via the Sonos app).

You might be right. It would be helpful if Sonos could weigh in and let us know what the plan is for addressing this. Clearly using Sonos/Alexa in multiple locations is a great use case they should want to support, and would in fact drive additional sales. I know that I would purchase additional Sonos:One units specifically to enable this.

bholding...the Sonos app isn't involved when you give a voice command to Sonos through Alexa. It could be completed powered down and the command would still work. So your ideas of having the Sonos app assist in some way by identifying your current location. Your toggle idea sounds good, in that perhaps you can use the toggle to update the Sonos cloud of which location you are at, but that would not update the device names in the Alexa app. So I don't think it would work that well.

Sonos could require that all zones in your Sonos account have a unique name, even at different households, and eliminate household id in the setup of the Sonos skill. That way all your zones are 'online' at all times. Of course, that's not going to be like by people that don't want to rename their zones to make them unique.

It would be nice if Amazon came up with the concept of "households" themselves, so you could identity what alexa devices and smart devices are located at which location. In that way, you could have duplicate names of devices and Alexa would assume that 'kitchen sonos' means the zone named kitchen sonos in the home you are currently in (based on which echo you are talking to. To command the kitchen sonos in the other house, you'd have to say "play xxx on kitchen zone in house 2", or something to that effect.

I am somewhat doubtful that Amazon wants to do that. It doesn't gain them a lot more customers since they are probably not targeting customers who have multiple homes. As well, they probably don't want to inadvertently encourage people in different household to share Amazon accounts, cutting them out of some profits.

I am somewhat doubtful that Amazon wants to do that. It doesn't gain them a lot more customers since they are probably not targeting customers who have multiple homes. As well, they probably don't want to inadvertently encourage people in different household to share Amazon accounts, cutting them out of some profits.

Amazon's Alexa devices already work from multiple locations, including streaming music from a single Amazon Prime account.

Agreed, but you currently cannot control smart devices in multiple locations, not without resetting skills. Well, I suppose that depends on the particular device and the hubs and protocol it uses. Regardless you still would need to have unique names for the devices.

rwborree above says he/she has LP-link smart switches that work in four locations, so I'd say yes. If I'm not mistaken, those use wifi (as opposed to ZigBee, zwave, clear connect, etc) and can work with Alexa directly without a hub. A lot of newer smart devices use wifi, so that should be the case for those. However, there are plenty of devices that don't use wifi, and require a local hub in order to be controlled. Alexa talks to your hub which talks to the device.

So if you have two homes and smart devices that require a hub, you would need to have a hub in both locations. I've never tried it (don't have a second house), but I doubt a particular brand of hub would let you operate 2 hubs under the same account. And then, you can't add two smartthings accounts under the same Amazon account (can you?).

Of course, you could get around this by using Smartthings in one home, while using Wink in another, for example. Still though, you can't have the name 'kitchen light' used for both houses as Alexa doesn't know which house you're in as far as smart devices go.

And that was my point really. Amazon could resolve this by setting up a household functionality, allowing you place different devices (including Sonos speakers) in different homes, allowing duplicate names, etc. It would be ideal for those with multiple homes. I'm just not sure Amazon would be motivated to do this. To me anyway, the ability to play Amazon music everywhere with one account is different. The streaming music market has an expectation to be more mobile, and it's a lot more competitive then the smart device market.

Well yes, but I wasn't grouping voice devices in with the other smart devices. Also, I expect the competitive features to be sound quality, microphone quality, smart home integration, AI robustness, look and feel of the device, calling features, streaming services, 3rd party skills, app features, brand loyalty....way before ability to control Sonos and other smart devices in multiple homes with one account. Not that it can't be priority number one to some people, I just don't see it high on the list for most people.

BTW in my experience Smartthings itself (without voice control) works brilliantly across two locations each with its own hub - this was all architected into the system and the app - I worked in the software industry for a long time and these are the sort of design points you build into the system from day one as its difficult to re-architect and you always want to your design to last - looks like this was a miss for Sonos. Hoping they can address it.