Question

Total screwup with room assignment

  • 10 September 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 629 views

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I've been using Sonos with Google Assistant since it first became available, but over the last several days there's a new problem: Google Assistant frequently forgets what room my Sonos One stereo pair is in, so when I say "Hey Google, turn on the light" I get the surprising and annoying response "Ok, turning on 8 lights" (that's a stupid bug on Google's part - there's no way that "the light" should ever be interpreted as "all lights" if it doesn't know what room it's in, but leaving that aside as a Google bug...)

When I check the Google Home app, I see my Sonos speaker pair in the correct room. A couple of times the problem fixed itself spontaneously after a while. A couple of times I was able to fix it manually by removing the Sonos speaker pair from the room and re-adding it. And a couple of times, like today, that didn't work because Google Home stubbornly says "There was a problem communicating with Google" whenever I try to touch the Sonos speaker room assignment (and it only affects Sonos, I can move other devices between rooms in GH without this message appearing).

Today I gave up and unlinked my Sonos account from Google and re-linked it. That worked as a last resort last week. Today it resulted in another disaster. After unlinking and re-linking my Sonos account, the speaker re-appeared in the correct room, but the microphone light went out and would not go on again even after unplugging and re-plugging power a couple of times. So I re-did the whole Google Assistant setup, and that got it back (had to re-do the settings from scratch). And it spontaneously re-appeared in the correct room, and now appears to know which room light to control again.

What a total mess! And given that it already happened 5 times this week, it's likely to happen again.😥

What's going on here between Google and Sonos?

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3 replies

I'm having the same issue as of two or three days ago. Normally I can ask Google to turn off the lights and it will only turn off the lights in the room I'm in. Now though, Google will turn off all the lights in the house unless I specify a room.
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And more weird trouble today, as GA on Sonos stopped obeying "Stop playing" commands, but it would still obey the Stop command if told the specific speaker name.

Then it started erratically responding "unable to contact Sonos" when asked to playing something. An unplug and reboot didn't fix it.

I remembered one other setting I made originally, designating the Sonos pair as the "default speaker" for Google Assistant, although I never knew if that made any difference. That was probably erased when I had to set up GA again, so I found where that was in the settings and put it back, then unplugged and replugged the Sonos speaker again.

That finally seemed to cure it for the moment.

So back to normal, where the main problem with GA on Sonos continues to be that on every second command or so it sits for 10 seconds with nothing happening, light on solid, not blinking, before the light starts to blink and it processes the command belatedly.
Doug Ames,

Just for info, if you remove the Sonos Action/Skill from the Google Account, it not only removes the speakers from the Rooms in the Google Home, but it also uninstalls the voice assistant from the compatible Sonos devices like the Sonos One, or Beam etc. So after re-linking the Skill, a user needs to goto the Sonos App and re-add the Google Assistant back to their speaker via “Settings/Services/Voice/Google Assistant/Add to Another Product”.

I assume you have now resolved that matter however, but thought it worth briefly mentioning that here for any others in this thread who may decide to remove/relink the Sonos Action/Skill within their Google App.

Hope that may assist some users.