Echo Dot default playback on specific Sonos device

User203193,

Just as a very simple example...

Create an Alexa Group called “Kitchen” in the Amazon Alexa App.

Add/place the echo dot (this should ideally have a different name to your Sonos Room Name) into the first section of the group.

Add the Sonos Kitchen speaker to the second section of the group... this will make its audio duck whenever you speak to the Alexa device that’s placed in the first section.

And finally add the Kitchen Speaker as the “preferred” speaker for the group.

When you say this to the echo dot “Alexa, play some music” (just as a simple example) it will play the music on the “preferred” Kitchen Sonos Speaker.

Hope that answers your question.

You need to set up a group for each echo device. This is like rooms in Sonos.

When you've done this for all your Alexa devices, you can then add the Sonos speakers to those group as the prefferd speaker. Note, EVERY Sonos device must be in a group or the feature will not work. So if you have a speaker in a room where there is no Alexa set up a group anyway and add the Sonos speaker as prefferd speaker in that otherwise empty group.

For example to the Alexa Group kitchen you add the Sonos speaker name you use in that room(which is probably named kitchen if your set up is like mine) as the prefferd speaker.

Do that for all groups (rooms) and it should work a treat.

This does indeed work as I’ve recently discovered. However very recently when asking to play a BBC station, the system has reverted to playing the BBC station through ugh the Dot rather than Sonos - have to qualify BBC request by saying BBC from Tune/In or BBC on room name - not sure why this has changed back. All other streaming service requests work correctly without reference to room name

This does indeed work as I’ve recently discovered. However very recently when asking to play a BBC station, the system has reverted to playing the BBC station through ugh the Dot rather than Sonos - have to qualify BBC request by saying BBC from Tune/In or BBC on room name - not sure why this has changed back. All other streaming service requests work correctly without reference to room name
The BBC Alexa skill does not (yet) support 3rd party smart home speakers, like Sonos, and so will only play on Amazon devices. A workaround is to always include the tunein service in your utterance.

As an example... “Alexa Play BBC Radio 1 from Tunein”.

I am not wholly certain, since this particular system is not in my principle home so not used everyday, but I’m fairly certain that for a couple of days this weekend BBC did play through Sonos without specifying TuneIn or room name. Something changed - I bought new IPad (old one wouldn’t support latest updates to Sonos) and think in setting up this controller there was a Sonos update. Now a simple BBC request plays through Echo Dot not Sonos . It’s the change in behaviour, or what I think is a change, which has prompted me to look on here and comment

It was more likely that the Alexa BBC player was down so they revert to tunein. It was very unstable on release a year ago so maybe they had more issues with it recently and switched it.

In the several months that I have been using Alexa with Groups and preferred speakers, it has always been necessary to add 'from TuneIn', or specify the room name, otherwise it plays through the Echo. Amazon Music defaults to the preferred speaker as expected.

It doesn't seem to make any difference if the BBC skill is enabled or not.

FWIW I just created an IFTTT applet, so that now if I say 'Alexa, trigger Radio Four' it plays on my Sonos speaker 'Master Bedroom'.

Not sure it was worth the 2 minutes effort!