Hi ​@P.Janssen 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thanks for reporting this behaviour - we have (mostly) been able to replicate it.

I will let the right people know so this can be investigated, but, in the meantime, please be aware that if you specify a percentage in your command, you should get the exact percentage you ask for - this is what happened for my colleague who was testing for us, at least.

I hope this helps.

Thank you ​@Corry P for your prompt reply!

I’m happy to hear that ​Sonos could replicate and will further investigate the issue. Hoping it could be resolved by a next firmware update 

I checked stating the requested volume level in actual percentages and can indeed confirm that this works as intended. Thanks for the proposal.

While playing around with Google Assistant and it’s settings, I also noticed that Google seemingly changed the tone of their available voices, both female and male. I’m using GA in Dutch so not sure if the same is applicable in other languages though.

Anyhow, with that I now hear a GA reply with the new voice tone (either male or female voice) but when tapping on/off the microphone on our GA enabled Sonos (ARC & ONE) speakers I hear the old (female) voice tone.

It’s not a major issue, but would appreciate if you could check this behavior as well and maybe align the GA voices and tones as used/selected with Google Home 

Thanks for the efforts!

Hi ​@P.Janssen 

Just to clarify, you hear two different female voices from the Sonos speaker depending on whether you just pressed the microphone button or not? You’re not saying that Google Assistant’s voice just sounds different on a Google Nest, for example? I don’t think I have ever heard of this, or indeed that there was a change of the voice in the first place.

Yes, when I press (tap) the microphone on/off button on our Arc or One (Gen 2) speakers, I hear the same female voice response “microphone is enabled/disabled” (in Dutch) as I am used to since I bought the products back in 2021/2022. I’m not using Google/Nest smart speakers 

But when I get a Google Assistant response on a voice instruction (like “what time is it”) I’m now hearing a different female voice. When I set GA to the male voice using the Google Home app, I’m hearing that male voice repond to an instruction as expected. But when switching on/off the microphones, the speakers respond using the ‘old’ female voice instead, as mentioned above.

It seems that Google has changed the tones of the female and male voice some time ago this year (at least in Dutch).

I was wondering if this should have been reflected automatically in the microphone on/off voice response, same as setting GA voice to female or male.

Hi ​@P.Janssen 

Thanks for the confirmation.

I have a Dutch colleague and he just checked and found that his Google Nest device and his Sonos Move both have the same behaviour, so whatever this is about, it seems it is Google’s choice.

For what it is worth, I can’t make much sense of it.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for this information ​@Corry P 

So it seems that the GA voices that I hear are fully controlled by Google. Maybe they might align sometime later… 

Still looking forward though to the resolution of the volume level setting issue in a future firmware update.

Hi ​@P.Janssen 

My guess is now that for some commonly-used phrases, Google keeps some pre-recorded wav files that it sends your speaker for certain replies - keeping a recording of these is presumably cheaper in energy usage than using Text-To-Speech engines each and every time. It seems these pre-recorded messages were recorded with the older voice, whereas non-pre-recorded messages are genuine TTS, and you hear them in the newer voice as a result.

You could point this out to Google - perhaps it is something that they have so far not considered.

Yeah the volume issue is strange; it is affecting Google, Alexa and Sonos Voice Control, but not for all users.

I hope this helps.

Your guess might be accurate; it would definitively explain the observed behavior. I’ll consider reaching out to Google as well.

I’ll keep an eye on future Sonos speaker firmware updates and come back once I have noticed that the volume setting issue is resolved.