Alexa ducking - why not fixed with groups?

Hmm... today suddenly the global ducking stopped. Is this finally fixed? Can someone confirm?

Same here. The ducking stopped, although it did everywhere and completely.

Yes, ducking is fixed.

You have to set up groups for all the rooms or locations in your house where you have Sonos products and be sure to assign them ALL to a group. Then ducking works as it should so that it only ducks in the room Alexa was invoked.

The second part of the fix is that you can set your Sonos speakers to be the default music player for a group. So you can just ask alexa to play music in a group and it will play from the Sonos speaker in that group. No need to specify the SOnos speaker name 🙂

Yes, ducking is fixed.


I own two play:5, grouped to a stereo pair. When any Alexa device is talked to the pair will duck. And yes the Sonos are in a group with exactly one echo. For me it is not fixed. Are you sure it is? There were several people saying it's fixed and in the end they realized it was just bugged and was ducking again after a reboot.

Yes, ducking is fixed.


I own two play:5, grouped to a stereo pair. When any Alexa device is talked to the pair will duck. And yes the Sonos are in a group with exactly one echo. For me it is not fixed. Are you sure it is? There were several people saying it's fixed and in the end they realized it was just bugged and was ducking again after a reboot.

Did you specify your Sonos room as the Preferred Speaker inside the Alexa group you created?

Did you specify your Sonos room as the Preferred Speaker inside the Alexa group you created?

Yeah I did that. I did some further tests. It might be a rollout in waves. Ducking works with the Echo in the same room as the Sonos. It won't duck when I use Alexa on my Phone and the echo in the Bathroom. But it will duck when I use the Echo in the living room. Maybe the feature doesn't work with the Dot Gen 2 yet? All Echos are assigned to their own rooms, so that can't be the issue either.

I'm not really sure what this change is, or how it's suppossed to work really. It does seem like changes are being rolled out, or modified in the cloud without us really knowing it.

I don't think it's an issue on what particular model of echo or Sonos device(s) you have, as all this should be happening in the cloud, as I understand it.

Dot Gen 2 works fine for me. Seeky, do you have any Sonos speakers that are not in an Alexa group?

Dot Gen 2 works fine for me. Seeky, do you have any Sonos speakers that are not in an Alexa group?

Nope, just the Play:5 pair. No ducking with Phone and Echo(where it previously ducked), does duck with an Echo Dot in an unrelated room.
I probably shouldn't worry and complain if it still doesn't work next week ;-)

Edit: Seems like the Kitchen Echo heard me and not the one in the Living Room. Thats an Echo Dot Gen1. That one might really not have the update yet.

I think you can force an alexa update by putting the dot on mute.