Using Alexa to play existing local Sonos playlist

This is really pretty much useless. With out allowing you to play your music library there is not much need for this integration. The new echo's with improved sound and the cost is so low there is no need to have sonos except for your music library as the sound is adequate for most people. they should have worked FIRST on music library integration as that would have been a game changer.

I respectfully disagree, as I said in one of the myriad other threads on this exact topic.

Streaming is how most people are consuming their music today. Not everyone but most. It simply doesn't make sense to go after the smaller target first.

It's worth noting too that the initial setup is in fact the easier target too. Sonos isn't doing the heavy lifting on voice recognition here, Alexa is. These features are already built in to Alexa, so it's only a better of "plugging" into them.

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I think most of the people complaining here aren't understanding the technology in play.

This is really pretty much useless. With out allowing you to play your music library there is not much need for this integration. The new echo's with improved sound and the cost is so low there is no need to have sonos except for your music library as the sound is adequate for most people. they should have worked FIRST on music library integration as that would have been a game changer.

Did you miss the fact that you can do everything except initialize play on anything in the queue? Play, stop, skip, pause, volume up down, etc.

So what your saying is you have to start your playlist manually, but after that you can use echo voice commands to control it?

Yes. As stated by Ryan S right above your rant, a quote from the original announcement. One might want to slow down a little bit and read the announcements before hurling stones. There are quite a few capabilities being overlooked, as well as future capabilities that will address any complaints.

well that's a start, thank you. a complete cheat sheet on what the new update does and how to do it would have been a great help.

Right in the Announcement area, top of the home page. With links to other pages.

https://en.community.sonos.com/announcements-228985/alexa-now-playing-on-sonos-6791301

I'm another one who uses a local music library, and technically I can intuit why this is limited to only the services Amazon has approved for Alexa. The one feature that I would use would be the auto-mute when making an Alexa request.

I just tried it, and it does mute, but if I tell Alexa to cancel (as in cancel the voice request the Echo Dot is now waiting for me to say) it doesn't cancel the request and return to playing, it pauses playback entirely and Alexa intones "I'm sorry, but something went wrong.". This is obviously very far from desirable behavior, but I'll chalk it up to the fact it's a beta.

So to tear down the integration, do I need to do anything other than disable the skill and tell Alexa to forget the Sonos devices? I don't know about other's experiences but telling Alexa to cancel or shut up is very common here - the voice recognition tends to often mishear its wake word. At this point it would seem I would constantly be telling Alexa to resume playback or pulling out my phone to unpause it, and this would not be well-received by the rest of the house. Maybe after this has matured and has more polish I can revisit it.

Likewise, I'm a little disappointed with the capabilities of the current Alexa integration. I have a comprehensive local music library, and don't have subscriptions to other music services. Its nice to see Sonos have released an Alexa skill, but for me its of limited use.