Apple Music via Amazon Alexa

I received the echo Dot for Christmas, I was very impressed with it at first, then I realised that you cannot use the Apple Music service with Amazon Alexa. I don’t think I have used it since.
What a dissapointment, I was just about to go and purchase 2 more play 1s for around the house but until this has been corrected I will hold off. What a shame!

In my opinion amazon music is better than Apple
Get rid of Apple and go Amazon ... thinking of getting rid of my Spotify and go amazon ... integration with Alexa is superb ... tried it all google apple Spotify and amazon come down to Spotify but now amazon trumps Spotify so amazon get my money

Hopeful one day amazon goes full wireless multi room and surround and I surrender to Amazon jungle

I am dropping Amazon Music for Apple because Amazon no longer allows uploads to their cloud. Before the change, if I had a track that was not on Amazon I would have the ability to upload it. Not now. I can still control the Apple playlists through the sonos app.

This is so sad... got an echo and was so excited to try it with Sonos until I kept hearing ‘I don’t have a playlist’... so useless and frustrating. I’m not switching from Apple Music, already have all my playlist and I’m very happy with the family membership. Going to return this to the store, was too good to be true.

Pourquoi ne pas avoir choisi Google ou Siri de chez Apple ??

I'm thinking this is a limitation setup by Amazon, not by SONOS.

I'm thinking this is a limitation setup by Amazon, not by SONOS.

It absolutely is. Sonos doesn't process the voice commands, Amazon Alexa does. In other words, Alexa has to understand and vet the request before passing it on to Sonos. If it doesn't understand or rejects the request for whatever reason, it will do so without passing on to Sonos. That's generally the nature of how 'Smart skills' work with Alexa.

Other 'non smart' skills work differently. When you state something like 'Ask Hayward to turn on the hot tub', Alexa doesn't try and figure out what hot tub is or whether or not it can be turned on. It recognizes that you are invoking the Hayward skill and passes the text on to Hayward's servers to deal with. This is actually how my pool control works, but it's annoying that I have to invoke the skill manually and it also means I can't integrate the pool with other smart features in anyway.

So sure, Sonos could have created a non-smart skill, but that would mean that customers would be annoyed with the need to invoke the skill manually. They also would have done all that processing of requests themselves, and they lose the ability to integrate in any sort of smart features (like Alexa cast).

BTW, clearly Amazon doesn't want users requesting Apple music through Alexa, but I imagine Apple doesn't want you to do that either.

I had the same issue with Apple Music, then realized that Siri was just laying around on the desk doing nothing!

So now I just say "Hey Siri" when I want to play Apple Music through the Sonos One. :)

(And I grouped it with the rest of the Sonos stuff in the bedroom, so now it sounds AWESOME!)

Now I just leave Alexa to tend to her normal duties. "Alexa, what's the weather gonna be like today?" and "Alexa, got any new elephant jokes?"

I'll give her more responsibility when she's ready. 🙂

Try using IFTTT and setup something like this

use alexa as the if, use the phrase play (playlist) on sonos

use sonos as the then

play (playlist) on (room):D

Now that Apple Music is available on Alexa (if you live in the US), could someone in the US tell us if it actually works ?
And does anyone know of the roadmap for other countries ?