Alexa to Multiple Rooms

I must assume that the people selected for the private beta of this will have fed back, I would certainly have done so had I been part of the beta.

Lack of Spotify and grouping functionality are such glaring omissions I must also assume that either the developers took absolutely no notice at all, or both were purposefully left out in order to satisfy some commercial agreement with Amazon.

The half herated attempt at voice integration may well be the kiss of death for me and both amazon and sonos. Having spent an awful lot of money on six amps, several play ones and a house full of echos and dots if google actually pulls off voice integration and grouping/multi room properly, then I can see me putting an awful lot of kit on ebay and swapping out everything for google hardware.

Either Amazon and Sonos need to actually work together to give the functionality people want, or people will simply just switch to google hardware where there is no cloack and dagger protection of their own music service.

As Chopdog said in another thread....

I'm assuming there are some urgent meetings going on in Sonos right now - along the lines of 'well, we thought it would be better but really screwed up!'

It seems to me some folks who have been pimping other solutions for months are extremely disappointed in the official release. Why, I am shocked, I say! Shocked!

Does anyone know if sonos and Alexa echo speakers (the new one) and perhaps other speakers will work together? Let’s say I have both an echo speaker and a sonos speaker in one room will I be able to say “alexa, play in living room” and it will play in all alexa speakers including sonos? Is this something planned?

Does anyone know if sonos and Alexa echo speakers (the new one) and perhaps other speakers will work together? Let’s say I have both an echo speaker and a sonos speaker in one room will I be able to say “alexa, play in living room” and it will play in all alexa speakers including sonos? Is this something planned?

No, Sonos and Amazon have very different syncing schemes. I would not expect them to be able to be grouped to play in sync.

Been testing this out today and it's pretty cool - but SUCH a shame multi-room's not combining right now with the Alexa devices. This has to be a top priority for me - that and the ability to control my surround sound (playbar + 2 play:1's and a sub) group. I was also hoping hugely that we'd be able to utilise the mic feature on the play:5 to control Alexa too?

Sonos has said they are working on grouping, but no more information than that (as is the standard response for the close-to-the-vest Sonos reps). Unfortunately, the mics on the Play:5 Gen 2 are not a far field array, and thus are not suitable for voice control.

You know, I take everything negative about grouping back. It is in fact easily done in the Sonos app, I was clearly doing something wrong, so who cares if you can’t do it through Alexa? Once grouped, I don’t tend to change grouping configurations anyway. Everything seems to be working great.

Being able to turn on multiple rooms at the same time with Alexa is one of my top 2 hopes for the Alexa/Sonos partnership (along with being able to play my imported playlists).

Does anyone know if sonos and Alexa echo speakers (the new one) and perhaps other speakers will work together? Let’s say I have both an echo speaker and a sonos speaker in one room will I be able to say “alexa, play in living room” and it will play in all alexa speakers including sonos? Is this something planned?

No, Sonos and Amazon have very different syncing schemes. I would not expect them to be able to be grouped to play in sync.

I disagree, this should be something you or anyone would intuitively think / expect. If i want to buy speakers that have a particular AI integrated i expect them all to talk to each other. If sonos wants to be agnostic truly then supporting a different AI is not the only thing they need to support, but they need to allow the ability to work with every product that has alexa built in which includes all speakers (third parties or by Amazon or Google itself). I will put this on a separate ticket as i think this falls on a different umbrella from this discussion which is simple grouping of sonos with sonos speakers