Over the past two weeks I have been incorporating a Sonos One into my multiple Sonos and Amazon Echo home environment. I have found the experience to be subpar at best, showing the difficulty of combining the technologies of Amazon into the Sonos ecosystem.
What should be a plug and play experience is instead a complicated setup experience. The set-up steps are unforgiving. One misstep moving between the Sonos and Alexa apps and you can find yourself in a loop where the speaker will not work.
While I worked through the initial setup with minimum pain, my trouble came when I wanted to move the Sonos One from one room to another. With any other Sonos speaker, this is easy. Unplug in one room, plug in another, and change the room name. Quick and easy. Not so with the One. Notwithstanding following every step that Sonos suggests when moving the speaker, I could not get the Alexa app to recognize ("discover") the Sonos One with its new name.
A call to Sonos proved equally frustrating with the Sonos tech support person wrongly insisting that the One should not have a name when discovered in Alexa app. I ended the call without resolution and moved on to my own diagnostic journey.
A clue came with another user post I found buried on a non-reddit forum. I had to launch the Amazon Echo desktop app (which I didn't even know existed) and tell Alexa to forget all smart home devices. You cannot do this in the mobile app. With all devices forgotten, the Alexa discovery of the newly named One went smoothly. But this was way too complicated and frustrating.
Once setup, the One continues to be frustrating. Tell the One to lower or raise its volume - seemingly a basic speaker command - is met with Alexa saying that this device can't do that. Really? Sonos put a voice controlled speaker in the market that you can't voice control the volume.
My fiancé is named Alexa and so I have changed my other Echo devices to "computer." Not so with the Sonos One that will not allow any name other than Alexa.
Say something that Siri or Google handle aplomb - play top songs by the artist] and the Sonos One meets with a response that you have no playlist called "top songs." All variations - such as "hits" of this also fail to work. "Play Beyonce's number one songs," and the One gives you a blank stare. Shameful for a music AI.
Play your music loud and voice commands go out the door.
At the end of the day, the overall voice experience is more frustrating than helpful. Perhaps this is an Amazon shortcoming but Sonos should have never released a speaker that does not respond to the most simple song playing voice commands.
This is a one star product and a blemish on the otherwise simple to use Sonos software and hardware.
I left this experience thinking that Apple - with its classic well thought out simplicity and new entry into this space - is going to dominate this market in a few short years.
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I left this experience thinking that Apple - with its classic well thought out simplicity and new entry into this space - is going to dominate this market in a few short years.
Perhaps; Apple certainly has the advantage of controlling every aspect of the experience, starting from Apple Music at one end to Siri at the other. And IMO they have done a wise thing in not rushing a half baked cake to market just to capture 2017 year end sales.
Thanks for taking the time to write up such a detailed post to share your feedback, Manateeformation. It sounds like you’ve had a frustrating experience and I’d like to apologize for that. We pride ourselves on having top-tier technicians and support. We’ll be looking into what happened with that call on our end as you shouldn’t have gotten the wrong information there.
Let me help with a few of your questions here, first off the Sonos One should be listed in your Alexa app twice. Once as the name of the player, and once as an Alexa enabled device. Each with different settings. Usually, if you move a Sonos One to another room, and change the name, just discovering devices should do the trick.
With the Sonos One, you shouldn’t need to use the name of the room for commands. For instance, you can say: "Alexa, play some Radiohead" and it should start playing on that Sonos One. Also, you shouldn’t need to use the room name or do anything special to tell it to stop playing, or change volume, which is definitely something that the Sonos One can do.
The errors you're describing could be because of another smart home device with the same name. I’ve seen it where lights with the same name as a Sonos player get targeted by Alexa, which don’t support the volume command. We’re working with the Alexa team on this sort of thing to see how it can be improved.
As to what’s coming next, I can’t share too many specifics right now. We’re working on some concerns that we’ve heard regarding the voice recognition sensitivity with the Sonos One mic-array, and we’re in the process of developing software updates to make some adjustments. If you’ve seen trouble here, you’ll find that the Sonos One will get even better at picking out when you’re trying to talk to it. We may support additional wake words in the future too, but no specifics to share on that just yet.
The next big things to look for on the Sonos One is the addition of Google Assistant and Airplay2, both of which should be coming in 2018. When that happens, the Sonos One will recognize “OK Google”, and you’ll be able to use Siri on your iOS devices to play to Sonos.
One thing you can always count on with Sonos players is that they will continue to improve and get new features with software updates. The Alexa control was brought to our very first made players from almost 15 years ago. We are dedicated to voice control and bringing the best voice-controlled speaker for music to our customers with the Sonos One.
Let me help with a few of your questions here, first off the Sonos One should be listed in your Alexa app twice. Once as the name of the player, and once as an Alexa enabled device. Each with different settings. Usually, if you move a Sonos One to another room, and change the name, just discovering devices should do the trick.
With the Sonos One, you shouldn’t need to use the name of the room for commands. For instance, you can say: "Alexa, play some Radiohead" and it should start playing on that Sonos One. Also, you shouldn’t need to use the room name or do anything special to tell it to stop playing, or change volume, which is definitely something that the Sonos One can do.
The errors you're describing could be because of another smart home device with the same name. I’ve seen it where lights with the same name as a Sonos player get targeted by Alexa, which don’t support the volume command. We’re working with the Alexa team on this sort of thing to see how it can be improved.
As to what’s coming next, I can’t share too many specifics right now. We’re working on some concerns that we’ve heard regarding the voice recognition sensitivity with the Sonos One mic-array, and we’re in the process of developing software updates to make some adjustments. If you’ve seen trouble here, you’ll find that the Sonos One will get even better at picking out when you’re trying to talk to it. We may support additional wake words in the future too, but no specifics to share on that just yet.
The next big things to look for on the Sonos One is the addition of Google Assistant and Airplay2, both of which should be coming in 2018. When that happens, the Sonos One will recognize “OK Google”, and you’ll be able to use Siri on your iOS devices to play to Sonos.
One thing you can always count on with Sonos players is that they will continue to improve and get new features with software updates. The Alexa control was brought to our very first made players from almost 15 years ago. We are dedicated to voice control and bringing the best voice-controlled speaker for music to our customers with the Sonos One.
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