How to activate Alexa mics on Sonos One surrounds?

As soon as you Enable the Sonos skill within Alexa then all Sonos Alexa devices have the capability to take voice commands. Can you please open the Sonos App>Settings>Room Settings>{Your Sonos One} and ensure that Voice Services are Enabled? If not please click Enabled and follow the prompts.

I am having exactly the same problem too. Beam never hears me. Especially when playing music or tv. It should not be hard to have the ability to pass voice command from one to beam and beam to tv with a software update.

I have the same issue. Since I added my Play 1's as surrounds my Beam (which was very responsive) now doesnt hear me very well at all. I have to get up and go and speak to it close quarters !

I was truly disappointed when, after spending nearly $1000 on Sonos gear, I found my Sonos Ones crippled once I added the Beam. I bought the Sonos Ones and a Beam specifically for full room coverage with Alexa. The One's are marketed as one of the best Alexa speakers on the market. There is no mention that Sonos would disable Alexa if you used them in a surround setup.

Sonos seemed to offer such a great, versatile system: you could use the Beam and Ones as a brilliant sounding 5.x surround setup; you could switch over to music and they would work together to fill your room; you would have three top-of-the-line smart speakers with sensitive microphones to pick up Alexa commands around your room. Except for the last part. We have to yell across the room to have the Beam pick up our voice when the One's are sitting 6" behind our head.

Please Sonos, at least give us the option to turn Alexa on/off on the Ones in a surround setup. If the choice is to enable Alexa on the surrounds without the ability turn on/off my TV, or remove Alexa from the surrounds completely, I'll gladly choose the former. I use Alexa far, far more than I use Sonos to turn on/off my TV.

I hope you can fix this and bring out the full value in our Sonos systems.

Thanks!

I absolutely agree....
This is really poor that when using Sonos Ones as surround speakers, then Alexa is not an option to use on them.

The whole Sonos/Amazon Echo integration is a farce. It simple doesn't work in the way anyone would actually use it. When I bought my One the intention was to get Sonos around my entire house, complimenting my Alexa's. All it does though, is compete with it and bring everything to a grinding halt. The Speakers in the garden (connected to a Sonos Connect:Amp for not a small amount of money), which has no Alexa capability, dims the sound when my 7 year old daughter asks the Alexa in her bedroom 30 metres away and on a different floor of the house to play unicorn songs! It's a joke! There was no thought put into the implementation at all, and despite these well documented faults, they are continuing to integrate it into more devices.

I am looking to get rid of my Sonos completely. I have better things to do than constantly fiddle with it because their developers can't build a robust system.

Hi Tim, currently, there's no way for an Echo device to know which Sonos players are in the same room, so your whole system will drop in volume when you trigger Alexa. The Sonos One and Beam are different in that we know what room they're in, and so when you trigger Alexa, only that room will drop in volume so that the command can be heard. We're working on making improvements on this experience for the future as the beta for Alexa with Sonos develops.

Yes hopefully we get a fix for the ducking of other rooms soon - - well overdue fix.

Hi Tim, currently, there's no way for an Echo device to know which Sonos players are in the same room, so your whole system will drop in volume when you trigger Alexa.

That may be the case, but even if my Connect Amp was sat right next to 100 Alexa devices it still couldn't respond to an instruction so what benefit is there in dipping the sound? It's not coming from Alexa as other devices don't do this My Harmon Kardon, for example.