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Sometimes when I say “Alexa, volume up” or “Alexa, volume down”, the volume on all 10 Sonos devices goes VERY low for 10 seconds before it going to the raised or lowered volume. This is irritating because if playing a podcast, I miss 10 seconds of the podcast. This doesn’t always occur, but probably half the time. This behavior recently started occurring.

 

I can understand if a Sonos device that has a microphone might lower the volume when someone is speaking to it, but this happens to all Sonos device even those without a microphone.

It’s likely that ‘Alexa’ considers all your Sonos to be in a single Alexa room, and consequently is ‘ducking’ the volume on all so that they can hear your voice.

Thank you for your response. I believe you are correct. But why does the volume go very low for 10 seconds before going to the correct volume? I can understand why the volume might go low for 1 or 2 seconds in order to hear the command, but 10 seconds seems excessive. In the past it worked correctly. Seems to be a feature of the new Sonos App.

Sorry, I don’t work for Sonos, nor do I have any particular insight into their design or programming choices. You may want to call Sonos Support directly to discuss it, although I’d suspect their front line people are equally uninformed about ‘why’. At least your voice could be passed to those who make those decisions. 

Yes, you are correct, I had all of my Sonos speakers and echo devices in one Alex group, which caused the “ducking” to occur on all Sonos speakers. I swear the 10-15 second “duck” just started happening, because it never bothered me until recently. Does anyone know if the ducking time shorter in the past? I think the ducking time should be customizable.

 

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction with groups.

 

The work around was to create multiple groups each group containing 1 Sonos speaker (I only have 1 Sonos speaker in each room that doesn’t have a build-in echo) and 1 or more echo devices. Then only the Sonos speaker in the goup is “ducked” when speaking to Alexa on an echo device that is in the same group as the Sonos speaker. This works fine and doesn’t cause irritation to someone in another room.

 

So then, I tried all of the usual commands, Alexa, mute”, “Alexa, volume up”, “Alexa volume down”, “Alexa, pause”, “Alexa, resume ”, “Alexa, cancel”, etc.

 

With grouping, “Alexa, mute”, “Alexa, volume up”, “Alexa volume down” only mutes or changes the volume on the Sonos speakers in the group associated with the echo that heard the command. “Alex, pause” and “Alexa, resume” pauses and resumes the stream so all Sonos speakers are paused. “Alexa,  cancel” also cancels the stream.

 

Since “Alex, volume up” only changes the volume on the Sonos devices in the same group, I tried to put all groups into a new group (a group of groups) that I gave the name “All” (I also tried “All Sonos”) so that I could lower or raise the volume on all devices with one command, “Alexa, volume down on All”, but this resulted in weird behavior. The volume lowered on only one random Sonos device.

 

So I am 99% there, except not being able to lower or raise the volume on all Sonos devices with a single command. Not a show stopper but would be nice. I will submit a request to Sonos.

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