Can you play music from your Sonos music library using Alexa?

You are correct that Alexa will not play locally stored music, this isn’t a Sonos limitation.  Alexa is a cloud based system and doesn’t know about your locally stored music.  You will need to initiate the music using the Sonos App, although once started you can use Pause, Stop, Next and Previous commands via Alexa.

I’m not sure why you’re thinking the feature is more likely to be implemented as time goes by.  As I’m sure you know, the market size for people using local libraries is getting smaller, not larger.  Businesses tend to focus efforts on things that more people care about, not less.  No doubt that a lot of the people who use local libraries do so because they don’t want to use cloud services like Alexa, making the market even smaller.  If there is a resurgance in use of local libraries, like there has been for vinyl for whatever reason, then maybe it has a chance.

Second, we’re talking about Amazon Alexa, which essentially exists for the purpose of keeping people in the Amazon ecosystem and spending their money there, whether it be music streaming, buying goods, etc.  They don’t care about your local library or supporting it.  They would only care if Google Assistant supported it or something, and thus they had to do it in order to keep customers.  But that’s not happening.

Your best bet would be for Sonos Voice Control (SVC) to start supporting local libraries.  However, since it wasn’t supported from the beginning, it leads me to think that it’s not a technical no brainer.  And again, because of the small market size, I expect them to focus on streaming services like Spotify with bigger markets, and additional language support.  Not to mention the need to produce new speaker products, since that’s how they actually make money.

Again, not at all unbelievable if you think about it.  But to be clear, you cannot innitiate playback, but you can use basic control commands like volume, next/previous track, mute, pause/resume playback while using your local library.

I wasn’t aware of the plex skill.  I’ll have to try this out.

That sounds like a Sonos apologetic response.  I see MANY posts of people with their own music libraries who want to play them.  It’s these greedy companies that want you to stream music from them for a monthly fee.  Alexa has a Sonos skill.  Sonos has the ability to add the Amazon music service.  So Alexa should or rather could know about your Sonos music library.  Either Sonos or Amazon or both, do not want this to work!

What leads you to believe the Amazon music service knows anything about your local library? 

Before this thread descends into a confrontational exchange, please remember users in this thread are not Sonos employees and we’re just trying to help.

Just to briefly add here, I’ve just tested this and the Plex Skill does indeed ‘happily’ play a users locally held music library, via Alexa, to Sonos devices - so this is at least one way to achieve the desired outcome.

When I was talking about the market, I wasn’t talking about an informal opinion based on observing people posting on the internet, but actual market data.

Like I said before, that would mostly be Amazon.  But I wouldn’t even say it’s a matter of “don’t want it to work”, but “do not think the effort of developing the feature” is worth it.  Considering how Alexa voice works, it’s not surprising really.  For the most part, your voice command goes to Amazon cloud to be interpreted and processed.  If you ask to “play xxxx”, Amazon will validate that playing xxxx is a valid request, pass it on to Sonos servers, which then passes it down to the Sonos speakers in your home.  It’s not much different then if you were playing on echo speakers, just that it would skip Sonos servers and pass directly back to your speaker.  If Amazon doesn’t know what ‘xxxx’ is, than it stops right there.

The plex skill is different. you say ‘ask Plex to play xxxx’. The Amazon server recognizes that it should just pass everything after Plex on to the plex server to deal with for Plex to deal with.  Sure, Sonos could have had the skill operate like Plex does, but having to say “Alexa ask Sonos to….” every time gets annoying fast, not to mention the other deeper integrations you’d lose, like alexa groups and not having to name the speaker to play on every time.

Again, this would only help a small percentage of Sonos customers who still use local libraries and likely don’t want to use Alexa anyway.

I’m not at all saying I wouldn’t want the feature.  It’d be great.  Particularly through SVC rather than Alexa, and I was a little surprised that it wasn’t originally included since I thought it would be easy from a tech standpoint.  But I don’t know, and also understand that it can’t be that high on the dev list considering all the other streaming services and languages that customers as a whole would surely find more useful.

There is no technical excuse for SVC not supporting local libraries. Mind you, there is no technical excuse for it not supporting Spotify either, but it doesn’t.

I have to point out that my now-retired Alexa-Sonos integration did both of these things. May it RIP.