Please fix that ducking feature

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.

Yes, there definitely needs to be a capability to connect / associate specific Echo's / Echo Dot's, etc. with a room and other devices in that room.

I've got the original Echo and 6 Echo Dot's throughout the house. These devices are used to control lights, fans, temperature, and now Sonos.

Here's an example of what I am experiencing in some way, shape, or form practically every time a command is given somewhere in the house.

- Child in front room where the TV is.
- I am in another room where I have Sonos playing an Audible book.
- We turn off Sonos in the TV Room so the child can watch TV, she closes the door so we can still listen to the audio book
- She now says Alexa, turn on Amazon TV
- Sound / volume on audio book (which is currently configured to play in multiple rooms) goes WAY, WAY down (barely audible ... pun intended)

I understand that all of this is an evolution but ... silly me ... I thought that the fact that Sonos was taking forever to release the integration was because they were taking the time to get it right. Right meaning that you could group rooms, select music from your own music library ... and not having the volume on all rooms basically turn off in every room when you issue a command in another room that is possibly on the other side of the house or on another floor.

Don't get me wrong, I do like it. It is a start. I know that it's complicated but damn ... well over a year for volume and start / stop control. Yes I know you can tell it to play some streaming station. Yes I play streaming stations but I actually usually scroll through the list to pick what I want. I generally have no idea what I want to play when it comes to a streaming station.

Yes, an option to turn off the ducking would be nice too.

Amazon / Sonos please fix this.

Thanks!

Yeah I'm having the same issue. Listening to music upstairs. Kids are in the playroom on a different floor. Every time they ask alexa to play music -- the music I"m listening to on a different floor goes away for several seconds. Very annoying.

My two cents: When Amazon/Sonos implemented ducking, they apparently didn't consider people who feed their echo dots into Sonos through the line input on the Play5, connect, or connectAMP. When I talk to Alexa, I expect to hear the answer on my Sonos system. With the new Alexis/Sonos functionality, the answer is almost inaudible because of ducking. That means that in addition to ducking Sonos music audio, which might make sense, they are ducking their own response, which doesn't .

Fortunately, I am using grouped Sonos devices, so I can pull the Play:5 that is connected to the echo out of Alexis by telling it to "forget" the device and since the Play:5 is grouped with other devices, it and the other devices all play the Alexis output at the normal volume. Unfortunately, the Alexis software will automatically rediscover the forgotten device and I'm back to not hearing the Sonos response.

I think there are really three very significant deficiencies in this long-awaited functionality: 1) Alexis should have the ability to avoid ducking its own responses, since it obviously doesn't listen while it is talking, 2) one should be able to turn off ducking altogether, and 3) the system shouldn't rediscover forgotten devices unless the user requests it.

This could be fixed with a configuration option to tell Alexis that it is connected to a Sonos line input. In that case, when the Echo is talking, it could temporarily switch Sonos to the line input and then switch back to the selected source. That would obviate the need to play all sources through the Echo into the Sonos. In the meantime, I would settle for being able to permanently forget the Play:5 or to be able to turn off ducking.

All in all, very disappointing. I can't be the only Echo dot user who connects it to Sonos, so why didn't they think about that use case?

I imagine they thought (as did I) that the Sonos skill would make the line-in connection to Sonos redundant. Honest mistake.

And, I would expect, at some indeterminate amount of time, it might get fixed. I imagine it's a 2 company problem, which generally means coordinating programming resources, difficult to do.

Just wanted to backup what upstatemike has stated. I can't remember where I read, but I have also heard that Amazon is working on grouping smart objects into rooms or the equivalent and/or tying them to a specific echo in order to simply command language. This actually exists in a form in that you can link a fire tv to a specific echo for voice command control.

I imagine they thought (as did I) that the Sonos skill would make the line-in connection to Sonos redundant. Honest mistake.

I guess they also imagined that all Sonos owners only have 1 unit too, if not they would have realised that this ducking feature wouldn't work.

Well, for those of us who live alone, it's not a substantial issue, either. But I think we all agree, it's probably getting attention.

I guess they also imagined that all Sonos owners only have 1 unit too, if not they would have realised that this ducking feature wouldn't work.

No, I'm sure that is a deficiency on the Amazon side, in that you cannot assign an Alexa device to a particular speaker at this time, so therefore, the command to duck goes to all of them. It may be that the Sonos side of the API also needs work. These are things to expect when an implementation is not fully baked. As I have said many times - Welcome to the world of beta!

They've been developing this voice control for over a year, plenty of time to sort it out with Amazon. It won't be beta next week and i'm sure it won't be fixed by then.