Sonos Era 100: Very poor detection of Alexa wake word

Question

I recently replaced my Amazon Echo with an Era 100, and have been very disappointed with its detection of the Alexa wake word.

On the Echo, I could be anywhere in the room, and say “Alexa, do X” at any volume level, even a whisper, and it would hear me. However, with the Era 100, we are regularly having to repeat ourselves, as it fails to detect us saying “Alexa”. I find we have to be standing directly in front of the Era, say “Alexa” firmly, pause briefly and then state my command, for it to work. But even knowing that, it still takes us multiple attempts to stop a timer going off as it never seems to hear “Alexa, stop” the first time we say it.

Do others have the same experience? Or could our Era be faulty?

Sotiris C. · Accepted Answer

Thanks for the quick reply ​@jcwacky!Unfortunately, it has been like this since I first got the Era 100 back in May. Switch looked fine, I’ve toggled it off then on just to be sure. Are you saying that it definitely shouldbe better than this?I can’t be certain as I do not own a Sonos Era 100 to test out but I would expect it to have better microphone sensitivity and wouldn’t need to be right on top of the speaker for the wake-up word to work.Last time I used Amazon Alexa was with my flat mate’sSonos Move and I didn’t experience issues with the wake-up word detection on that one. I’ve also not seen many reports for this specific issue on the Sonos Era 100 here in our Community.If you’d like, give the workarounds I mentioned on my previous reply a go and if you feel like it’s still not working as expected, reach out to our Support Team for further troubleshooting.

Sotiris C. · Answer

Hello ​@jcwacky, welcome to the Sonos Community!I am sorry to hear you are experiencing issues triggering Amazon Alexa on your Sonos Era 100.There are a couple things you can do to resolve this:Ensure the microphoneswitch on the back of the Sonos Era 100 isfully toggledOn. You can flip itOffandOnagain, just make sure it’s fully toggled and not stuck in the middle.After the recent AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage on late October, we’ve seen an increase on Amazon Alexa related issues as you can see in our Sonos Status page.Workaround 1: You might see a "reauthenticate" prompt upon opening the Sonos app, or when selecting Amazon Alexa under room settings. If so, please follow the on-screen prompts to attempt reauthentication.Workaround 2: Reboot all Sonos products in the household, then retry Amazon Alexa commands when the Sonos system is back up and running.Workaround 3: Follow the instructions under Advanced Fixes within the Alexa commands not working on Sonos Support page. RemoveAmazon Alexa from the Sonos app, and disable the Sonos skill in the Alexa app. Then, re-addAmazon Alexa and retry Amazon Alexa commands.If you are still experiencing issues, feel free to contact our Support Team for live troubleshooting. They have tools at their disposal to provide you with information and advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.I hope this helps.

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