Selecting a radio station with Alexa integration

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Anybody have thoughts on how you will be able to select radio stations using the Alexa integration? In the US all stations have a unique 4 letter call sign so you can say exactly what station you want to hear but if you wanted to listen to say 98FM in Dublin what could you say to ensure you get that station and not some other location that transmits at 98FM?

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controlav

Lead Maestro

Here is how it works today in my skill: "Alexa, tell my speaker to play 98 fm Dublin in the kitchen" and it works. "98fm" doesn't work as Alexa turns this into "98 fm" and TuneIn search picks "heart98-fm" for that (you can try this yourself in the Sonos app). However adding "Dublin" to the search makes TuneIn pick the station you want. The smarts are in the TuneIn search really, I didn't realize until I tried this how clever it was.

I would assume the official Sonos Alexa solution will work the same way.

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Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.

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upstatemikeAuthor

Tried it on Alexa natively (no skill or integration) and "play 98 FM Dublin" gets the response "I could not find a station named 98 FM Dublin". Adding "from TuneIn" to the request just yields "I could not find any station named 98 FM Dublin on TuneIn". I wonder if the API accesses TuneIn differently than Alexa does natively?

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controlav

Lead Maestro

Interesting test. However its not terribly surprising that Alexa searches TuneIn using an API (and endpoint) different to the SMAPI one that Sonos use.

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Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.

melvimbe

I'm hoping we'll be able to setup a favorite with a user friendly name. So for your example, you can add that radio station as a favorite in Sonos, then give it a label like 'Dublin Radio', then be able to say "Alex, play Dublin Radio'....

It's going to make things really difficult if this sort of thing can't be done, for both music sources and zone groupings. Besides being annoying and difficult to remember exactly how to say a long command, longer commands also means greater chance for Alexa to get it wrong.

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Danny

Stuart_W

World-Class Superstar

I imagine there is going to be a lot of refining once this goes live based on the feedback of users.

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Everyone

Contributor I

I'm hoping we'll be able to setup a favorite with a user friendly name. So for your example, you can add that radio station as a favorite in Sonos, then give it a label like 'Dublin Radio', then be able to say "Alex, play Dublin Radio'....

It's going to make things really difficult if this sort of thing can't be done, for both music sources and zone groupings. Besides being annoying and difficult to remember exactly how to say a long command, longer commands also means greater chance for Alexa to get it wrong.

Same issue. What makes it worse is when you try to call a "manually" added station. It is impossible to use Alexa to call the station even so it is in TuneIn / My Radio Stations 😞

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