Amazon Echo controller

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
You're trying too hard! Look at my post above, someone has already written an echo integration. The 3 parts: 1) an Alexa skill that defines the structure of a voice command 2) an Amazon Web Service to receive the data from the Skill and call a URL running on your home (sonos) network 3) a simple program running on your network that receives the calls from AWS and translates them to a sonos command on your network. I have this working. It could use some more fine control, but it works fine.

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
I've seen your post, but I believe the solution I'm describing offers a lot more functionality:

- Now you can just say: "Alexa, play Madonna"
- Or: Alexa, next"
- Or: "Alexa, volume up"
- Or: "Alexa, what is the name of this song?"

To sum up, you cannot use any of the native play capabilities.

To set it up initially, your solution might be easier, but it does not provide the same user experience.

In the end it's all about user experience, otherwise we could just play music on the Amazon Echo and forget about Sonos.

I have been running an integration for about a week. You need to set up a file with presets (play this playlist in these rooms at this volume) but it works great... "Alexa Ask SONOS To Play Rock" and this will play a playlist named Rock from the SONOS favorites. You can add playlists with different names by adding them to the preset file.

Volume UP/Down and PAUSE are implemented, though not resume as of yet...

Setup is a little technical for those unfamiliar with it, but it worked perfectly for me.

NOTE: This requires a program called node.js to be running on a PC/MAC/Linux machine on your network (SONOS will not listen directly to the internet nor the Echo device, so you need to run this java program to listen for the commands from Amazon, answer the Echo and then control SONOS). That part is implied in the instructions, but everything else is walked through.

https://github.com/rgraciano/echo-sonos

Also: To have that script start on boot on Windows as a service, I used the "qckwinsvc" package from this page:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20...

NOTE: Plain English playlist names work well, and DO NOT capitalize the name of the playlist, the JAVA program will not match a capitalized playlist name with the parsed name it receives from the Echo (which will be lower-case).
Bravo! Thank you -- I I will work on getting this going... Really though, your effort shows that it can be (relatively easily) done as a proof of concept. It sounds like there is room for improvement by Sonos (eg having the bridge act as an intermediary with Amazon, ability to define location name of the speaker, ability to play things other than playlists -- eg Pandora -- , not worrying about the case sensitivity of the playlists etc) but they should all be relatively low hanging fruit. The fact that consumers are getting it going on a rudimentary basis should underscore the appetite in Sonos' customer base for this solution. I hope someone from Sonos is reading this thread and at least posts that it's on the roadmap.

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
With the system I posted you say "Alexa ask sonos to play..." or "ask sonos to volume up" or "ask sonos to next". All the functionality you are suggesting is available or easily coded. You could even code it to request the name of the song/band/album/Playlist. It's really not that hard, certainly on par with what you have suggested. Furthermore, you gain all of the other services beyond local files (Pandora, Spotify, songza, stitcher). Also, I have been delving into the Echo, and I'm not sure that there is an api available to figure out what the Echo is doing. Did you find one? The hiccup with sonos is the configuration. Ultimately we want "sonos play this from this service on these speakers" ; that's a lot of possibilities to handle without error. Lastly, though I am impressed with the Echo sound, I have 5 zones in my house, and one of them uses the sonos TV bar + surround. Echo is a long way off from that functionality even if you discount sound quality.

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
You're right, the system you're pointing at works with "Alexa, ask Sonos to ...".
This extra step is small, but I still would prefer to avoid it.

Gaining access to other services than local files is easy in my idea too. The Sonos speakers are playing what the Echo is playing. This can be a local file or a service.

I found one 'API' pointing to what the Echo is playing, but I have to dig into it further:
https://github.com/camalot/Amazon-Echo-Api

Currently I already am using a "Sonos Operator" managing all of my Sonos speakers. Groups of speakers are formed based on the location of persons in rooms by joining / unjoining Sonos zones to groups, automatically. This is based on the SoCo python implementation: https://github.com/SoCo/SoCo

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
You have something track individuals throughout the house? Maybe a better question is how are you deciding what to add and remove as people move through the house?

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
Any home automation system, connected to sensors, knows where people are.

What (Sonos zones) to add and remove depends on variables:
- is a room of the house 'occupied' by people?
- what's the time of the day? (not playing during the night in the bedroom)
- who's in the house?
- ...

This is decided by a 'Sonos Operator' based on SoCo.
SoCo can be used to easily join and unjoin zones to groups. Also, it can be used to play mp3's or services. Combined with gTTS it can be used to play a text to speech message, in all the rooms of the house.

I believe it's relatively easy to integrate Amazon Echo with Sonos.
With the solution described in my idea, you can use the Amazon Echo native play capabilities to control the music played on your Sonos speakers.

You can play, pause, or stop music, and you can control the volume.
Also you can ask what song is currently being played.

Read the whole description of my idea here:
http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,155.0.html
The node http proxy employed by the other solution handles all of those sonos commands too (or, from a quick look, pretty much all of them); To use it with the amazon service you would just have to code them up on AWS + add the Alexa skill intents. I will check out that python system in more depth later on. I see how you can get the sonos zones to auto configure, but what I have found is that I either use the system with basically standard groupings (LR + DR + KITCHEN), Party mode, or it's custom depending what we're listening to and who's in the house (bathroom playing while I'm in the shower, wife in the bedroom, kids watching TV). I don't see how auto-configuring the system to try and anticipate what I want as I move through the house would be useful, at least not in my house. I have thought about using my Home Automation to trigger SONOS when doors open or motion sensors go off, and apart from some very specific cases, it doesn't work for me. (Specific cases: I have SONOS speak to me and tell me when the garage has opened/closed, or when an Alexa timer has sounded). If you have yours doing something cool and intelligent- that's sweet. But the first time I walked into the LR and the system killed the TV audio to play Phantogram my wife would kill me, and if it did that while my kids were watching Phineas and Ferb I would find my Echo tossed out the window. 😉 As for skipping the "Alexa ask XXX to YYY..."; this is how the Echo has been programmed to handle third party integrations- and there are a lot of them coming! I would get used to it ! 🙂 (I have also integrated SmartThings home automation and wrote my own API for NextBus to get bus arrivals near my house.- they all use the "ask" intents.)

Sonos needs to get with it and get on board with Echo before they loose out on speaker marketshare with a Echo/some other speaker bundle.

Sonos is amazing but the control is very limiting.