Sonos One support for Alexa AudioPlayer interface

Behavior has changed with the 8.5 firmware, but this interface still isn’t working.

Yes, the Sonos Alexa skill was released four months ago. This functionality really should have been there on day one. A LOT of skills not functioning on the One due to this basic omission. The $49 Roav VIVA in my car has it, a third party product that’s newer than the One. Patience wearing a bit thin...

I don't know that this is exactly a fair comparison. I could be off on this, but the VIVA is connecting to the Alexa via your phone, which probably requires Amazon's alexa software to be up and running to function properly. In other words VIVA is just piggy backing off what Amazon has already implemented themselves on your phone, not using a 3rd party API as Sonos has to do. That cuts down on the required development, since the VIVA can do basically everything you can do through Alexa on your phone by default.

I don't know that this is exactly a fair comparison. I could be off on this, but the VIVA is connecting to the Alexa via your phone, which probably requires Amazon's alexa software to be up and running to function properly. In other words VIVA is just piggy backing off what Amazon has already implemented themselves on your phone, not using a 3rd party API as Sonos has to do. That cuts down on the required development, since the VIVA can do basically everything you can do through Alexa on your phone by default.

Unlikely. It does a lot of vehicle-specific things, like interacting with Google Maps, which definitely aren’t being done via the Alexa app. I haven’t tried uninstalling the Alexa app on my phone, but don’t recall it being a pre-requirement. The VIVA app has its own Alexa GUI, and doesn’t launch the Alexa app. Besides, Amazon publishes full documentation for its Alexa APIs. It’s obvious that they want third parties to use them, not the Alexa app, which appears not to have any public API.

I would like to add my support for this. I bought a new Sonos One for this but can't use it. Should be made clear on adverts that you can't play local music.

Sonos One's integration with Alexa appears to not support the AudioPlayer interface. Our Alexa skill, "My Media for Alexa", uses this API to stream music, however, we see no requests being made by the Sonos One when we send an AudioPlayer Play command.

Please can Sonos advise whether this is a bug and/or when it this capability will be added to the Sonos One?

Thanks

A bunch of skills were added today, perhaps they've finally enabled the AudioPlayer interface, not sure. Hopefully you can check your skill, the folks who still play from their NAS will be interested...

Please implement asap

So we have retested My Media for Alexa with a Sonos One and it now *almost* works which is promising! Sonos One devices now advertise via AVS that they support the AudioPlayer interface and play mp3 files fine, however they do not reliably send AVS notification messages on track events, eg PlaybackStarted, PlaybackNearlyFinished, etc this means we can’t queue up the next song to play. This seems to be intermittent behaviour as we did see the notification messages once whilst testing! Also the interface doesn’t seem to support m4a containers?

Not sure who in Sonos can help resolve these issues? Happy to work with you guys and give you some Alexa intent references.... please email us at support@mymediaalexa.com

I use My Media for Alexa to listen to my music library through an Echo Dot using voice commands and it works perfectly. However, when I try and use my two Sonos Ones the music starts properly but after the first song finishes it repeats endlessly. If I ask Alexa via the Sonos One to stop the playback, I get the reply "Sorry I'm having trouble with accessing your My Media skill right now." If I ask Alexa to skip to the next song I get "Your device didn't send a valid playback token. Please contact support."

Since the skill works perfectly with Amazon products but not with the Sonos Ones my only options are to either return my two Sonos Ones and replace them with Amazon speakers which I know will work, or hope that Sonos fixes their problem with the Sonos Ones. I like the sound of the Sonos Ones but right now they are unsuitable for what I want them to do and I'll return them if I have to.

We have tried to raise this formally with Sonos several times by email. We get an email back saying it's been forwarded to the Alexa team within Sonos, but no bug id, no way to check progress or follow up.

We've sent another mail but does anyone know anyway to formally raise bugs with Sonos other than emailing their developer feedback email address? Really want to get this working with Sonos but it's hard when there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to help at the Sonos end 😞