Mycroft AI Request

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/list-of-voice-requests-for-sonos-voice-control

That’s all it can. Just think of things you ask people/the internet for everyday. One would be rather limited, if requests would be reduced to the aforementioned list.

Examples:

• Turn on light (smart home, explicitly excluded in quick guide in the android app)
• Read the news
• What does foo mean
• Translate foo to Klingon
• Add skills, similar to Alexa

To your second point:

Adding features rather than reinventing the wheel is more often than not the better alternative, yes. Considering this, however, it would be more wise to include the very well featured Mycroft service, rather than catching up to it with the homebrew solution, wouldn’t it? In addition to the already big feature list, community is further improving the service for free!

+I got the feeling, that Sonos does not intend to further expand SVC. I did not find the quote explicitly stating this, however considering that there is support for using SVC together with Alexa/Google it hints in that direction.

Maybe some staff reading this can clarify.

SVC is presently not intended as a ‘smart-home’ voice assistant - it’s a voice assistant to ‘exclusively’ control your Sonos speakers/devices - using voice instructions. It’s not there for lights, heating, plugs, skills etc. that’s for Alexa and other services to do those things …and is why they presently operate side-by-side on the speakers to just compliment each other, they are not there to compete, at least not at this moment in time, as far as I’m aware.

If Sonos do continue to expand SVC, then it will still likely have their own device-control at the heart of that development.

More languages for SVC would also be nice….

Exactly.

And this is the reason why I wished the team for adding Mycroft, which also counts to the list you refer to as “others”. Different to Alexa, Google (and SVC) it is a privacy focused, full-featured Voice Assistant. It adds value to the product. (And it’s open source)

Even if the developers probably won’t listen. However, if enough people express the same wish, things gonna change. So here we go:

Sonos team, please add Mycroft!

That’s probably the crux of the matter here, as @melvimbe expressed in the initial response to this thread - not many folk seem to have heard of Mycroft and when/if it becomes popular worldwide in the countries that Sonos sell to, then would be the time to perhaps consider it as a viable alternative.

I’m not totally dismissing your feature request here, but I do think the demand will certainly need to be there first …and it will need to be proven secure and private, when put in place.

Sonos may not commit resources/money/time to another voice enabling platform when they already have their own service doing the core element of controlling their speakers anyway, that’s at least if they do not have plans to compete in every aspect of smart-home device control.

They are a speaker manufacturer first and foremost and may prefer to concentrate their efforts with that in mind. I guess time will tell. I personally hope they stick to their core business and continue to share services with other partners like Amazon etc; rather than spreading resources too far afield.

I think that a prime motivation for SVC, in addition to privacy concerns, is protection from being dumped by one of the major voice services after some sort of intellectual property spat.