Google Assistant slow to respond Sonos One

There is some delay, yes, but since I cannot compare GA to Alexa I cannot say if Alexa works any faster.

What I can say is that GA generally works well and is certainly capable of starting Spotify. It has some quirks though. I have GA coupled with Philips Hue and one of my rooms there wil not switch of if I use a certain phrase. In the GA app I can see GA understands me (it shows “lights on the patio off”, the phrase I use in Dutch - my native language) but it’s response is “I wil turn two lights on”. Another quirk is that some Hue-command wil be acknowledged by a “bong”, while others will be acknowledged by a phrase. And sometimes “Hey Google, lights out in the attic” will result in GA quoting Wikipedia about a book with that title (again, in Dutch).

Yes, that’s all very common behavior. Among other things, one of the minor faults with Google Assistant is that it sometimes spontaneously loses the association between the speaker and a specific room, in which case it foolishly interprets the command “turn on/off the light” as “turn on/off ALL lights”. 

GA on my Sonos did go through a spell of very slow responses in the first few months - it would sit there with the white light on solid for about 10 seconds before it started to flash and process the command, as if it didn’t realize I was finished speaking. But after a few months that problem seemed to go away. It’s still not as fast as Alexa, but it’s fast enough. Unfortunately more recently it has picked up a new problem where it gets into a state where it fails to respond to about half of the commands (even within routines) - it just sits there for a full minute with the light on and then says “sorry, something went wrong” or “there as a glitch”. Rebooting the Sonos speakers and the router does not help - the only thing I’ve found that cures it is to reboot the whole network. Sonos wasn’t able to diagnose the problem.

I have the same issues with GA. When I first configured it it worked fine but now it is slow to respond and half of the time comes back with the comment “something went wrong….” 

I did eventually find a workaround for when this problem occurs. I change my Sonos One running GA to a different LAN IP address. That immediately cures the problem. No idea why.

I’ve got a quick and convenient process now using the utility program dhspsrv on my computer, a DHCP server set to respond only to the MAC address of the Sonos GA speaker. It changes the Sonos GA speaker between two reserved LAN IP addresses without disturbing the rest of the network, issuing a non-expiring lease. The Sonos GA speaker is fine for a month or two, then the problem occurs again, and I flip it back to the other LAN IP address, which cures it again.

Thanks Doug I’ll give it a go!

Thanks Doug, that seems to have done the trick, back up and working now...