Please fix that ducking feature

So I was in the kitchen last night, I turn on the Play:5 using the Android controller. Now when in the living room when I tell my Echo Dot to turn on the lights the Play:5 goes quiet whilst Alexa is listening!

Why does it do that?

I believe it is a limitation of the Amazon API which does not yet have a way to associate a particular Echo with a speaker or light in the same room. In other words it does not know which Sonos speakers are in the same room as you so it ducks them all to make sure you can hear the response from the Echo. I also think Amazon wants to address the association issue not just for Sonos but also to make it easier to turn on lights in the same room as a particular Echo without having to name the room in the command. We will likely see this fixed but Sonos can't do anything until Amazon provides the API calls required to do it.

This is really annoying! It makes the Alexa integration unusable for anyone that has an Alexa that is not right next to their one and only Sonos. It's driving my wife crazy forcing me to disable it for now. Amazon or Sonos, one of you please just add a setting to turn off the ducking!!!

How would you fix it? Would you make it "duck" just the speaker you're controlling, or the speaker that's closest to the device that you're speaking in to. How do you tell which one is closest? Do you define in the app the speaker(s) that are closest to each Echo device?

Not disagreeing with you, I'd like this feature, too, but if I were writing up a requirements doc, I'm not sure I would know how to define the behavior for the coder to implement. Interested in suggestions on how it could be fixed.

How would you fix it? Would you make it "duck" just the speaker you're controlling, or the speaker that's closest to the device that you're speaking in to. How do you tell which one is closest? Do you define in the app the speaker(s) that are closest to each Echo device?

Not disagreeing with you, I'd like this feature, too, but if I were writing up a requirements doc, I'm not sure I would know how to define the behavior for the coder to implement. Interested in suggestions on how it could be fixed.

I believe the expectation, and Amazon's intention, is to create associations in the Alexa app of all devices within a given room. This would allow ducking in the room you are speaking from without affecting other locations. There would be little value in ducking the speaker you are controlling unless it is in the same room you are.

Once Amazon implements this and adds it to the API Sonos will still need to do some coding to take advantage of it and push it out in a firmware update. Hopefully competition with Google will drive Amazon to implement this soon. Likewise Sonos will hopefully make this a priority to address it as soon as the Amazon piece is done.

Interesting. This is the first time I've heard of Amazon's intention to define a "room", but that would certainly make it much easier.

I have seen reference to it as a way to make lighting control more intuitive. If you are in the Living room and simply say "Alexa turn on the lights" the living room lights would come on while the same command spoken in the kitchen would turn on the kitchen lights. If this is implemented it should extend to speakers and other device types as well thus enabling the ability to associate a given Echo to a particular Sonos speaker (or set of speakers). This is the missing link to allow Sonos ducking only in the room you are speaking in.

I agree, that some way of associating Sonos speakers with Echos would be great (whether that be by "rooms" or something else). However in the meantime, I would just like an option to turn off the ducking completely because as-is, it is more annoying than useful.

In the meantime, an option to turn off ducking completely would be nice.

Turning that feature off would be good. We can surely be trusted to turn down the music, if it's too loud, before speaking to Alexa; that's what we previously always had to do anyway. I have 6 zones in a moderately large house and was trying to figure out why the volume kept dipping. I now see immediately that someone was speaking to Alexa in another room. Well, I think I'll turn off the Sonos skill now rather than fall out with Alexa over it, and try again in a few months.

I think it would be easier to go old school and use a phone/controller. I think I'm done with voice control for Sonos for a while. Voice is great for turning my lights on and off but i want to browse my/new music before choosing. I guess skip/pause/etc may be useful by voice.