Sonos and Alexa - My Library

You paid for voice control of your local library?

You paid for voice control of your local library?

Fair point, but Sonos allows me to access my local library. I hoped that Sonos voice control would give me just that, voice control of my all my Sonos.

You paid for voice control of your local library?

Fair point, but Sonos allows me to access my local library. I hoped that Sonos voice control would give me just that, voice control of my all my Sonos.

We all hoped. We hoped wrong (for now). Sonos is in a partnership with a company that doesn't give a fiddler's fig about your local library. Plus, local library access via the Alexa interface is significantly, magnitudes actually, more difficult on the Amazon side than accessing streaming services that Alexa is already able to search and stream very easily even before its attempt to partner up with 3rd party smart speakers. Given these two facts, the math is not that hard to figure out.

Try my Alexa Skill for Sonos: it supports selecting music from your local connection by voice. (Only for US users though, until Amazon fix that, and requires a Windows 10 PC, though as you have a local library there's a good chance you have one of those).

Is there any thread immune from you pimping your Sonos skill?

Hey jgatie, I am just pointing out a solution to the customers question, and also pointing out that it is not impossible to do as also claimed in this thread. I don't ever post a link, even, never mind the name of it. "Pimping" is also unfair, it implies I have some monetary gain from it: I actually lose money every month, when I pay my Azure bill.

I am as disappointed in the official Sonos/Alexa solution as anyone else: I expected my Skill to be made instantly obsolete when it released, but far from it, it offers so many of the missing features that people ask for on these forums.

it offers so many of the missing features that people ask for on these forums.

Yeah, not pimping at all (and by pimping, I mean promoting, monetary gain aside). The reason you don't post links is because you know that crosses the line. I'm just saying it gets annoying, and the last thing you want to do when you are "promoting" your stuff is to be annoying (or even coming close to it). User jishi has been developing 3rd party stuff for Sonos for years, but he does it right. You could learn a lot from him.

Oh, and by the way, your skill was obsolete the day it required to run a server on a PC. I thought that stuff went away with the demise of Squeezebox.

Try my Alexa Skill for Sonos: it supports selecting music from your local connection by voice. (Only for US users though, until Amazon fix that, and requires a Windows 10 PC, though as you have a local library there's a good chance you have one of those).

This is the first i've heard of another Skill, probably as it doesn't show up for me in the UK. Do you know when it will be available over here?

This is the first i've heard of another Skill, probably as it doesn't show up for me in the UK. Do you know when it will be available over here?

It will be available a week after Amazon enable a feature known as "built-in Intents" outside the USA. This feature has been available in the USA for nine months or so, but is unavailable in the UK or Germany. And developers are pissed about it: https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/50740/there-is-a-growing-gap-between-what-a-us-dev-can-d.html

Oh, and by the way, your skill was obsolete the day it required to run a server on a PC. I thought that stuff went away with the demise of Squeezebox.

Why bring up Squeezebox again?

You do accept that the latest Sonos - Alexa development depends on a hell-of-a-lot of backend infrastructure (all of which can go awol) compared to a 25 usd raspberry pi? And over which the end-user has absolutely no control whatsoever.

Your high-level of 'support' commitment over the last couple of weeks attempting to gloss-over the evident problems with the Sonos-Alexa integration suggests it's no longer the simple 'plug'n'play solution you suggest it is, compared to the 'obsolete' squeezebox .