Sonos Skills in Alexa India account

@Corry P It isn't an exaggeration for the voice controlled One that is also being sold. Your excuse for Sonos holds no water for that model in the product line up on Amazon India.

@Corry P : Copy pasted from the feature list of the unit on Amazon India:

• Brilliant sound - Get rich, room-filling sound with Sonos One, and control it with your voice, the Sonos app, Apple AirPlay2, and more
• Voice control - Amazon Alexa is built right in so you can play music, check news, set alarms, get your questions answered, and more, completely hands free

If this isn't false and misleading, I don't know how to define that adjective “false and misleading”.

@Harish'sG  and other India located customers on this thread:

Be aware that Sonos does not treat you with the respect you deserve as a paying customer, no matter how small a market you may constitute for them, such that you are irrelevant in their eyes. Buy therefore at your own risk.

Fortunately there are now many options easily available in India for getting equally good and feature rich solutions that this need not be a dampener on your ability to experience what other Sonos customers in geographies like the US /UK do. This was not the case when I bought Sonos via Amazon US for use in India back in 2011, but many others have now caught up with Sonos.

Hi @Kumar

As this is in English, it seems it’s been copied from our main product feature list (intended for fully supported regions). As we do not sell products anywhere but on our own website, it seems Amazon have bought stock and decided to sell some of it in India (if it’s even Amazon that’s doing it - who is the seller?), and therefore it’s not our advertising or responsibility, but Amazon’s (or the reseller’s). 

Similarly, you could sell your Arc on eBay, claiming that it can play DTS. It’s not true, and it’s not our fault you’ve made that claim.

I made no excuse. I objected to your description of a speaker not able to use voice control in an unsupported region as “essentially does not work”. Essentially, a speaker plays music. Semantics, I guess.

@Corry P I can understand that as someone that gets a salary from Sonos, you have no choice but to support all that they do. Other readers will figure that out too.

But this is the same tired argument that Sonos trots out about other issues, where the first thing it does is blame other service providers; this is like a government party line, but we would be foolish to expect different.

Since you asked: This voice controlled unit is also NOW being sold by Amazon India’s trading subsidiary in India. So it isn't the case of “if it’s even Amazon that’s doing it”.

My objection is to the fact that the voice controlled unit is also being sold, at a premium, alongside the Sonos One SL. The premium being collected is for voice control. A feature that does not work in India.

But... it is never Sonos’ fault. The lawyers would have their knickers in a twist if any Sonos Staff was to admit that.

So you want Sonos to talk with Amazon India to get them to change their product description or stop selling the Sonos One in that market?   Why wouldn’t you complain directly to Amazon India?  I’m not saying Sonos couldn’t do something about it, and perhaps it’s a contract violation of some sort, but I would think the more direct route would be a better way to go in this case.

I don't want Sonos to do anything. I am only updating Indian customers about why they are better off not buying Sonos. 

I reckon Sonos, for the same reasons, will also refuse any warranty obligations for non voice controlled products.

@Corry P I don't understand why Sonos' developers can't simply enable the Alexa skill for English (IN). Its just a checkbox that they've to click. No code changes needed. We're not asking the Sonos Alexa skill to support Indian languages. We're just asking for it to work with the Indian dialect of English, which is practically the same as the British dialect.

Until this small change is done, the only way to use Sonos with Alexa is to change my country settings in Amazon to USA. This comes with its own problems as it prevents me for accessing Alexa skills which are specific to India.

As others have mentioned, this request has been in the pipeline for many years now. Could you please share if there has been any effort at all from the development team on this? Whether you sell your products in India or not, we're your customers, and more importantly, we're fans of Sonos products. Why wouldn't you listen to a simple request from your user base?

In the time it takes for you to respond to this thread, you could enable the Alexa skill for English (IN). I'm an Alexa skill developer, so I know.

I suspect it is more than just a check the box thing and involves Sonos server infrastructure upgrades to ensure that the necessary Sonos and Amazon server level integration works fine all the time in a distant geography. 

Amazon sees India has a strategic market of interest, and therefore does not allow India to lag behind the rest of the world in terms of product/feature releases. Sonos does not, and given all the options that are now available in India to what Sonos offers as a solution, I doubt that they will ever garner much volumes in India - and knowing this may well be behind Sonos dragging their feet on this.

And although I am not interested in the Sonos skill anymore having bypassed the need for it, I would be happy to be proved wrong via a release of the skill.

As someone who has actually rolled out a Sonos Alexa skill to India, I can tell you it is NOT just a checkbox. The India endpoints have less language features than the en-us ones so you need to adjust the schema, change the code to handle the differences, then re-test everything, plus you need to host your servers somewhere vaguely close to India else the latency is a killer. You also need to stand-up a permanent test system in each geography in order for Amazon to test against every month or so, else they disable your service. Just some of the reasons it was easier to pull my entire Alexa skill then try to keep it running.