Sonos and Alexa in two houses

What are you trying to accomplish TreeGuy?

I have Alexa controlling Sonos at my home with an Echo. I'd like to add a Sonos 1 at my parent's place. Can I use my Amazon Prime account at both locations (I know I can't stream Amazon music on both at the same time with my standard Prime account).

If you were to link the two houses with a VPN would you still need to disable/enable the Sonos skill whenever you change locations?

I have Sonos in two houses and am a big fan. I added an Echo dot in my primary house, and am finding the Alexa integration to Sonos is good and getting better all the time. It has quickly become the primary way I interact with Sonos. Great addition.

However, based on my experience - and the discussion I had with Sonos support - this is not ready for prime time if you want to add the same Alexa account to a second house (which is what most people want to do because you probably have one Prime account for yourself or your family...) I recently purchased a Sonos: One (with Alexa built in) and installed it in our vacation home to add Alexa to that system as well. I quickly realized that there's a big problem with this, as there's no way to differentiate between houses - i.e. there's no "toggle" so Alexa knows which house you're in. As I understand it, EVERY TIME you go from one house to the other, this is what you currently need to do:

> Launch Alexa app on mobile device
> Search for Sonos skill
> Disable Skill
> Enable Sonos Skill
> Login to Sonos again
> Select the Sonos system (house) you want to use
> Allow Alexa to control your Sonos system (which links to Sonos)
> Disover Devices

Once you've gone through all this, then Sonos should work on the system/house you've selected, BUT it will no longer work on the other house. Also, there's a real possibility that if you don't get these steps all correct, you can actually be in one house and turn on zones in the other if you happen to label them these same (e.g. I had Kitchen zones on both houses and scared the heck out of my wife when I turned on the stereo from the other house...)

I believe this issue needs to be resolved through a combination of work between Sonos and Amazon. In fact this may be more to do with the various rights and restrictions Amazon places on Alexa accounts. Nonetheless, until this gets worked out, I wouldn't advise using the same Alexa account with two different Sonos systems/houses - it's a real hassle.

I see a lot of pissed off people and returns in the near future....

In fact this may be more to do with the various rights and restrictions Amazon places on Alexa accounts.

As far as I can tell its not an Amazon restriction because my Echo's work fine from more than one location. Also, I'm able to stream Amazon Prime at both locations, but only one works with Alexa (the other I have to control via the Sonos app).

You might be right. It would be helpful if Sonos could weigh in and let us know what the plan is for addressing this. Clearly using Sonos/Alexa in multiple locations is a great use case they should want to support, and would in fact drive additional sales. I know that I would purchase additional Sonos:One units specifically to enable this.

Hi everyone, we know this can be a bit of a pain point, and if it helps this all comes down to account security and system setups.

For Alexa to work with Sonos, the commands go from the local device, up to the Alexa cloud, over to the Sonos cloud, and then down to your system. Your system is linked with your cloud accounts at both servers. Which means all devices you have linked to those same accounts are going to show up because your cloud-based account doesn't understand multiple locations. We have a unique identifier that's used at a household level, but it only allows you to switch which of the households you're controlling with voice.

I'll pass the request along to the development team to make the flow easier here, and maybe find a way around the problem, but I don't have any specifics to share. The Alexa integration is still in development, and it will keep on getting better.

Thanks for speaking up everyone!

Ryan, thanks for responding. Would be great if your team could come up with a creative solution for this. In a perfect world the Sonos app would recognize where you are (location) and automatically link to your local Sonos system (house) in that location. As an interim step to that, adding some type of toggle within the Sonos app where you could select from your various locations would probably also work. However, the current workflow that requires you to Disable > Enable > Login > Select Location > Allow Control > Discover isn't viable. I also don't think it's realistic to ask users to set up additional Sonos or Alexa accounts for each location/home. It's too complicated for most people, plus one of the big benefits of all this is leveraging the music offerings provided by your Prime account which you will want to be accessible to you in each of your locations. I actually think this is a big opp for Sonos - if you guys can get this right, it will be a significant driver for your business. Good luck.

bholding...the Sonos app isn't involved when you give a voice command to Sonos through Alexa. It could be completed powered down and the command would still work. So your ideas of having the Sonos app assist in some way by identifying your current location. Your toggle idea sounds good, in that perhaps you can use the toggle to update the Sonos cloud of which location you are at, but that would not update the device names in the Alexa app. So I don't think it would work that well.

Sonos could require that all zones in your Sonos account have a unique name, even at different households, and eliminate household id in the setup of the Sonos skill. That way all your zones are 'online' at all times. Of course, that's not going to be like by people that don't want to rename their zones to make them unique.

It would be nice if Amazon came up with the concept of "households" themselves, so you could identity what alexa devices and smart devices are located at which location. In that way, you could have duplicate names of devices and Alexa would assume that 'kitchen sonos' means the zone named kitchen sonos in the home you are currently in (based on which echo you are talking to. To command the kitchen sonos in the other house, you'd have to say "play xxx on kitchen zone in house 2", or something to that effect.

I am somewhat doubtful that Amazon wants to do that. It doesn't gain them a lot more customers since they are probably not targeting customers who have multiple homes. As well, they probably don't want to inadvertently encourage people in different household to share Amazon accounts, cutting them out of some profits.