When does Sonos expect to have support for Google Assistant?
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It would not surprise me if Amazon paid for a N month exclusive. Integrating GA is just not that hard.
That would go against every historical relationship that Sonos has ever had. They have declared service and voice assistant neutrality. Their API has always been free to any service, they have never paid for any licensing and have not given exclusivity to any service. For them to give exclusivity to Amazon would be very unusual, given this history.
But it is just not a 4 month project (assuming they were only working on it since release). I think an exclusive still falls into the agnostic bucket but this just forum blathering. I was just speculating. I am a fan of their hardware and software so i cannot wait to dump spotify and move back to Google throughout.
Note that the Amazon/Sonos partnership was not simply using the Alexa API. There is significant work on the Sonos end also, work that was done in conjunction with Amazon, but with an eye toward making a Sonos based cloud and universal voice control API suitable for all voice assistants. If Sonos had wanted exclusivity with Alexa, it would have simply done a "Alexa, tell Sonos to . . . " skill and be done with it.
The same holds true for the Google side. I highly doubt they are going to go out of their way to create a Sonos voice control API and then use some off the shelf code to incorporate Google. This is why it takes longer. This agnostic approach is more difficult and time consuming than coding directly to each specification, and it requires some amount of compromise between vendors. However, in the long run it allows you autonomy and ease of maintenance.
This is the approach that enabled Sonos to incorporate more music services than all other multi-room audio systems combined, and it seems to have been successful, if not very efficient to implement in the beginning phases.
I just bought the Player 5 because i read that this thread that there was going to be Google assistant for it. I to hope Sonos provides support for it soon. Cheers
A little perspective here might be good. Yes, the feature will be nice to have but holy cow, talk about first-world problems.
I suspect this is the reason companies are hesitant to give dates in the first place. If something gets delayed, people are super whiny about it, implying false advertising, etc. So the whinier people get about it, the more they confirm Sonos's sense that giving a release date is a bad idea.
I'm not sure what you mean by "integrate"? I'm planning to retire my Home speaker in my living room when the assistant is added, providing it functions in the same way. My mini in the bedroom will remain. There is no reason you can't have several Google speakers on the same WiFi network as the Sonos but you would need to turn off the mic if any other speaker is in the same room, for fairly obvious reasons.