Does Sonos intend to allow Alexa to access my local/itunes library?

I do not foresee alexa being able to ever access local music.

Yes, please do "forward it for visibility" Keith. I'm encouraged that you say "When.." and not "If..." -- especially as it appears that Sonos allows Alexa (via a "skill") some level of control, Unfortunately, otherwise uploading to Amazon and maintaining a second very large library of private music would be too laborious and costly to justify simple voice control/recognition.

For both Sonos and Alexa -- the combination would truly would be a "killer app."

Chris: "I do not foresee alexa being able to ever access local music."

Chris, why do you feel that way? Is there a strategic/business-related impediment? Technologically, my music library, Alexa and Sonos are all using the same network. To me it seems that if the parties want them to communicate, they can and will -- and I don't see why a music libary index MUST be uploaded to some central server, if it's already right there on the same network...?

I want to add my request to DVanO's. I love my Sonos setup with Play:1's but listen to a lot of local music and am very disappointed to find that my new Sonos One won't play it via voice control. Uploading to Amazon seems like a big project that really shouldn't be necessary.

Alexa would have to go that direction and they are very web centric not local network centered. They are all for uploading your collection to cloud not dealing with local libraries. Sonos isn’t going to be able to do anything to access it and even if they could they have made a strong push away from local music (what updates have we ever seen recently to local library handling..none). Just direction of things at Sonos and amazon lack of local focus.

Yes, please do "forward it for visibility" Keith. I'm encouraged that you say "When.." and not "If..." -- especially as it appears that Sonos allows Alexa (via a "skill") some level of control, Unfortunately, otherwise uploading to Amazon and maintaining a second very large library of private music would be too laborious and costly to justify simple voice control/recognition.

For both Sonos and Alexa -- the combination would truly would be a "killer app."
Keep in mind, I cannot speak for Amazon and what their pipeline looks like. The proverbial "ball" is in their "court".

I understand Keith. And, regarding "The proverbial "ball" is in their "court".-- I might expect that, as there appears to be a technology hurdle to explain this lack of function, that if BOTH companies worked together to find a solution one might be more easily achieved.

Example: Sonos drivers could be modified to add extra control "hooks" that allow Alexa to access the music library locally. And Amazon updates Alexa to be able to reach down into the network and pull that information directly. That sort of thing. I should think Sonos would want that functionality for its customers. And also Amazon...Oh...I get it now. The ball really is in their court IF their primary interest is in promoting their Amazon music services. I certainly hope that's not the case.

The issue that might be hiding in the corner is the "security" issue of allowing "any particular company" access to your local network for processing of data.

There are those who would cry foul saying that at that point, they'd be not only parsing your music titles, but all of your tax returns, your bank information, pictures of your children, etc.

I think it's more technically not an issue than it is legally. In fact, there are already systems that do this kind of thing (think Steam, a gaming service, or Blizzard, who look at your hard drive and parse what files are there, in order to patch them). So the technology exists, in some forms. I think it's more an issue of the fact that it's much more of a unique to the individual, rather than a "the library already exists, and we're just scanning to copy things to you, rather than actually parsing what's there" which is the hurdle.

But frankly, that already exists too, with multiple online data storage and back up companies. It's just that they don't really parse the individual data, just take it and copy it.

It'll be interesting at some point. And I'm one of those who will be excited. 98% of my listening comes from my NAS.

I do think one of the things that they'd have to think about is storage for the data. If Sonos is going to keep track of my data, I suspect that they don't really want to keep my music files, just a list, much like they do with the data on the speakers. It's just a list of pointers. So I could easily see a similar function like the current "update my library" which takes all of the necessary data and pushes it to (the currently non-existent) cloud servers of Sonos, for my system to access.

I think there's land mines all over the place here, both from a development and legal perspective. It will be interesting to see how it resolves.

On the ultimately question: It is like the economists say - in the long term it doesn't matter, we are all going to be dead anyway. The equivalent that both Amazon/Sonos may be waiting for is "dead = no more use of NAS, just streaming services". As it is, over a year ago, Sonos claimed that less than 10% of its use is for local NAS listening.

And by not offering this feature, 10% to "close to zero" will be accelerated, if my experience is any guide. Whenever I do use Dot in the limited way I am allowed to just now, my preference is for Amazon Music, being the only one available to me where I can initiate music play, not just do the volume control thing. And, Amazon would also hope that this acceleration results in more Amazon Music subscription revenue for itself. How else to differentiate the music service?