Alexa & Sonos - what is is likely to offer?

I like @upstatemike's ideas, but I would be surprised if we see this in the first version. For one thing, I expect the integration to be somewhat 'stateless'. By that I mean that Alexa won't know what room it's in, won't know what speakers are in the same room, or what those speakers are currently doing. Sonos won't know what Alexa is doing either. If was 'state' then Alexa and Sonos would be more tightly integrated and more aware of where it is and what else is going on in the ecosystem.

So for example, in order for Alexa to automatically mute the system when it receives a command, it would have to know that sonos speakers in the same room are currently playing music. You wouldn't want your bedroom speakers muted while you're talking to Alexa in the kitchen.

As for showing lyrics on the Show, I think that again would require a much stronger/tigher integration then necessary. It might be fairly easy to do so if Amazon Alexa was the music source, but to remain in sync, there would need to be a lot of feedback between Sonos and Alexa. What if you started a song through Alexa, but then paused in with the Sonos app? You wouldn't want the lyrics to keep scrolling, so there would need to feedback whenever something changes on one of the two sides.

I agree that this would be great functionality though. And....many of the issues would be naturally resolved with a Sonos device with Alexa built in. I can see where they use functionality like this as a motivation for buying a new product instead of your exiting speaker and a dot.

I'm not sure how the scrolling lyrics work but I think it is tied to the position (time readout) of the song. If so the lyric scrolling would pause when the song is paused regardless of the mechanism used to pause it.

I have a "no longer used" Play5 Gen1 in the kitchen where everyone used the Echo, and now are using the Echo Show, instead of Sonos. I am going to leave it in place until the integration is released so I have it available for testing. It will be interesting to see if people choose to use Alexa voice control to play better fidelity music through the Play5 or if they stick with "good enough" fidelity on the Show so they can keep their lyrics display and auto muting.

Another interesting test will be the Living Room + Dining Room + Library which I always group together when entertaining. Will it be better to have a dot in each room along with the Sonos speaker so the group can be controlled from any of the rooms? Or will it be more popular to have a single Echo Show in one of the rooms connected via Bluetooth to a multi-zone amp feeding the three locations? The second option lets guests see the music artwork and scrolling lyrics but provides only a single location for voice control.

Lots to try when the integration is released and I can't predict for sure what configurations are going to end up most popular when all is said and done.

For echo show to show lyrics and play to Sonos that would mean using echo music source (not really want we want as far as getting all sonos music sources)

Amazon prime music - note for the echo users here. With prime you get limited selection of music. They have their premium tier amazon music that I believe is like $9 per month now on sale for 99cwnt over next few months. Worth checking out as another music source for Sonos and Echo while it's cheap.

Lyrics would not work for all sources but it might work for more than just Amazon Music if other services have an API that supports it. The communication would be between the music service and an Echo Skill developed by whoever, and not necessarily the core integration so no reason for it to be limited to an Echo music source.

Probably wishful thinking. The echo is either going to use its own API accessed by Sonos which supports lyrics) and limited to echo sources or use Sonos API to access Sonos sources (but no support for lyrics). I would think most users would rather have the Sonos Api route and no lyrics but all Sonos sources. Otherwise it's lyrics and the echo sources (which hopefully start expanding beyond their limited few)

I have Sonos and just bought Alexia. Please Sonos, we need you working with Alexia.