Yesterdays (March 11th, 2016) Sonos Anouncment

The sales figures don't back that up.

What are the sales figures?

Interesting. MacFarlane was asked specifically about SoundHound, said they're not going that direction. So, Alexa it is, then!

http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7256313/sonos-ceo-john-macfarlane-from-the-desk-of

I find this paragraph from the article really interesting. Obviously they've been looking at it longer than a week but interesting that perhaps a few conversations including one with an uber driver may have had some influence. Emphasis added mine:

I was at the Allen & Co. conference in Tucson last week and everybody there is a Sonos owner and they were asking, "What do you guys think about voice, will that ever be a part of Sonos?" And it became blindingly clear to me that it was important that we step into that conversation. Coming back, the Uber driver asked me about it. He literally overheard the discussion with Joy [Howard], who is our CMO, and Pete [Pedersen], the leader for PR. He got off the phone and said, "Man, you're totally right, I was gonna ask you, How do I integrate my [Amazon] Echo with my Sonos?" And he had a Play:1 in one room and an Echo in the kitchen and Play 1 in his bedroom. I came back and said we just need to step into this because we're tone deaf if we don't.

Come to think of it, they hired Matt Welch back in Sept, so Sonos has been thinking about Alexa voice control for a while. They have no doubt been improving Matt's Alexa integration ever since.

http://mattwel.ch/

http://mattwel.ch/voice-control-for-the-sonos-with-an-echo/

So the only question is how to solve the microphone issue?

Ah, I see your point. Didn't mean it that way, simply that I'm not sure what Sonos' plans are to ensure that consumers with $180 - $200 burning a hole in their pocket choose the Play:1 over the Echo.

If consumers have to buy the Echo to get the voice control, Sonos will have to somehow convince them to also buy a Play:1. Or, can Sonos come up with a standalone microphone array device that's very cheap to enable Alexa, and convince consumers that they're better off with the better SQ and music selection of Sonos speakers vs Echo. Must be some really interesting strategy sessions going on down in Santa Barbsra.

Well, after a bit more reading, I think Sonos may be hooking up with Alexa after all. She's free and easy, apparently, for all takers. Would save a huge development effort; Sonos just needs to add skills to control their own system. I'll wait for the Beta before ordering a Dot, though...

Not sure where that leaves the Play:1, but I'm sure Sonos has a (revised) strategy.

What difference would it make to the play:1? If they can integrate Amazon's voice control then what's the problem?

Echo sales are apparently denting Play:1 sales pretty badly, at least that's my thought as to why Sonos is suddenly having to change their strategy.

Well, after a bit more reading, I think Sonos may be hooking up with Alexa after all. She's free and easy, apparently, for all takers. Would save a huge development effort; Sonos just needs to add skills to control their own system. I'll wait for the Beta before ordering a Dot, though...

Not sure where that leaves the Play:1, but I'm sure Sonos has a (revised) strategy.

Is there any reason to think that a new speaker / playbar is soon and if people should wait on a big purchase?

Searched the Sonos job postings just now for any sort of clue, nothing found. One principal design engineer lists microphone array experience, but searching for "voice" or similar apt terms gets no applicable hits.

Sonos also needs to somehow counter those brilliant Alec Baldwin commercials for Echo. 😉

Yes, I've seen the AWS case study, and some of the other Big Data stuff Sonos is doing; I'm an engineer geek, love keeping up! ;)

Sonos' big problem right now is that they had a runaway hit, the Play:1, which they had ambitious sales targets for. It has suddenly hit a brick wall called Echo, which they hadn't expected or prepared for. People willing to spend $200 for a speaker are much more intrigued with Alexa's capabilities and future possibilities than with the (much) better SQ of the Sonos alternatives.

The number of reviews of Echo, 33000 vs < 2000 @amazon.com is a pretty good indicator of relative sales. My guess that Echo sales chart has a logarithmic upward tilt right now, while the Play:1 chart has started to sag considerably. Sonos is out to fix that.

But for me this is a major step.

Not only do they need to have a hardware/software solution that has a very high accuracy rate for I don't know, let's say, 10 major world languages but they have to make it replace any of the controllers. People are going to be very unhappy when they get the Mary Poppins soundtrack when they wanted The Anti-Nowhere League (NSFW to listen to any of their stuff btw!). Also, they aren't going to want to have to get up and shout at their Play 5.

So I think it's a huge risk. Obviously control is a huge part of the package but they can't lose sight of the hardware (the quality speakers) and the music sources

I've felt Amazon is a competitor before, but I'm not sure now. Amazon looks to be wanting to seize the day with Alexa, opening it up to as much as possible. Sure the original Echo could be seen as competition, but it's not multi-room. It's also looking to be more of a voice activated gateway than an audio device. That's it's one selling point, otherwise it's a deluxe Bluetooth speaker. The new Dot is even more gateway then speaker, cause it has no speaker. :)

Also, Sonos' relationship with Amazon goes beyond Prime Music. They're heavily invested in Amazon Web Services:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/sonos/

So they're already working with an infrastructure that is run by Amazon. Could tapping into the Alexa Coud be next?

Fun times! 🙂

Voice control is not something that has made any impression on my life in any way beyond amusing my 10 year old niece for half an hour. That was cool but she'll have grown out of that by the time I meet her again.

But of course that doesn't mean that I don't believe that voice control for Sonos doesn't have a future. I worry that it is just a gimmick which is fun to play with but ultimately doesn't improve Sonos enough. What are you going to control with voice? Volume, next, previous track. Next playlist. I see huge challenges in designing a suitable interface to adequately navigate to the next piece of audio the user wants.

And there is the question of which technology to use - Amazon, Apple, A N Other. I can't believe Sonos has/will develop their own and why would they jump further into bed with Apple further alienating non Apple users and Amazon are a competitor.

So I'm very interested to see how it all pans out