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So this morning all my Google Home automation routines that have a command to activate a Scene started interjecting “Ok, activating (name of scene)” when run on my Sonos speaker, but not on Google Home speakers. On the Google Home speakers the command continues to execute silently like before. This screws up the way some of the routines play out unfortunately.

Compounding the problem, there seems to be a new bug with automation routines running on Sonos. When a routine with several steps is created or an existing such routine is edited, it will stop after the first 3 commands or so and exit - but only on Sonos, not when run on a Google Home speaker. Editing the routine further to drag the command order around and re-save it can cause it to start working again on Sonos.

I do not have the “Ok, activating (name of scene)”, but my "Hey Google, good morning” routine, consisting of Set volume to 50%, read the wheatherforcast and play the news from two sources, only tells me the time. Nothing more.

It also does not play TuneIn or Spotify from GA anymore, but still turns on my Hue lights and closes my Somfy blinds.

It’s apparent that Sonos is suddenly now lagging behind on update edits to the GH automation routines by at least 24 hours, with updates which take effect on Google Home speakers within 60 seconds taking a day or longer to take effect on Sonos. This makes it virtually impossible to experiment with possible work-arounds for the previous bugs. It’s very disappointing how badly Sonos and Google have screwed this up between them.

Sonos doesn’t do any processing, except for their own voice assistant, everything is passed to an appropriate server (Google’s or Amazon’s) for processing, which then sends the appropriate action to your devices (or, in the case of music, directly to the Sonos). So any ‘delay’ would be on the server side, and not in the Sonos. You may want to reach out to Google in this case. They may not be updating the Sonos server at the same time as they’re updating their own speaker’s server. 

Realistically there’s not much hope of Google doing anything. They will simply point out that automation routines are working just fine on Google Home speakers and in fact on every other smart speaker running Google Assistant (I tested a few). Only Sonos has a problem - just like the last several problems. I suspect that in view of the bad relationship neither company is making any effort to avoid causing issues or to solve them.

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