Is this ever going to get better?

Hi Doug, some of that behavior sounds like it may be network related regarding your One’s link back to the Internet. Do you have any trouble with songs cutting out while playing or the player not showing up in the Sonos app?

If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest that you contact our support team and work with a technician to investigate what’s happening.

Google Assistant on your Sonos should function just about the same as it does on your Home Mini, with some slight functionality differences based on features that might not be available on Sonos. In other words, it should take just about the same amount of time to do commands that are supposed to work.

That’s an easy answer, but it’s not the right answer. My Sonos speakers are close to the router and receive a strong signal.They never had a problem when they were running Alexa. My Echo Dot now in the same location never has a problem. Sonos GA never freezes when I ask it a simple question, like “what’s the weather?”. It’s almost always when I ask it to run a Google routine. Music never cuts out - If was playing music and I issue a GA command that has an error, the music volume goes low but continues uninterrupted in the background.

Actual test, performed just now: “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” Ans: immediate answer with current and projected weather. Then “Hey Google, morning wake up” (a routine). Sonos freezes with the white light on solid for almost a minute with no response. Nothing can unfreeze it. Then “Something went wrong. Try again later.”

I can see in Google’s activity log that it got the command and recognized it correctly - and then nothing. But I say the same thing to the Google Home Mini, and everything works fine.

As you suggest, it does sound like it might not be network based. 

What’s your “morning wake up” routine supposed to do? 

What other types of commands have the same sort of issues? 

My routines usually have several commands. The morning one turns on the light, turns up the thermostat, says the weather, then plays my news briefing. With Google Home it almost always runs successfully, and if a step fails it gives an immediate error message.

With Google Assistant on Sonos, what seems to happen is that part way through it freezes and goes unresponsive for more than a minute, then says something failed. Lately it does this more often than not.

Do you think you could test a couple routines by dropping one or two actions to see if it behaves better without one type of command? For example, make a routine that turns on the light, turns up the thermostat, and says the weather. Then try one that turns on the light, turns up the thermostat, and then plays your news briefing?

The idea is to see if it’s the amount of commands that is stalling it somehow, or a specific type of command is causing the issue. I’m testing out a few myself as well to try and recreate it. I don’t have the thermostat available to test with, but I can manage the others.

I would be happy to try these tests, but wouldn’t you know it - suddenly everything is working fine again. After 100% failure rate last week, this week the routines are 100% ok. I’ll wait until the next time it starts failing and try more detailed tests then. I have a feeling that something specific in some routines is occasionally failing for reasons unrelated to Sonos, and the difference is in how Google Home and Google Assistant on Sonos respond. Google Home reports a failure very quickly, while GA/S freezes for a minute waiting for something.

‘Google Assistant on your Sonos should function just about the same as it does on your Home Mini, with some slight functionality differences based on features that might not be available on Sonos. In other words, it should take just about the same amount of time to do commands that are supposed to work.’

Ha Ha - so untrue

You’re right Doug. This service is riddled with problems and Sonos don’t seem able to fix any of them

Hi Bigskull, if there’s something in particular that you have trouble with I’d be happy to take a look, or if it’s missing functionality I can always pass your requests on over to the development teams.

Ok:

1. Regular functions working and then not working at random (device not available, content not available, sorry I don't know how to help with that, 'stop' command not working. etc etc).
2. No shuffle command.
3. No voice calling
4. No voice recognition for multiple accounts (this is probably the most important)
5. No microphone on 2nd speaker of stereo pair (as with Alexa).
6. Ridiculously loud assistant replies (especially with Beam).
7. Delayed response.
8. Assistant responding on phone and speaker.
9. No ability to thumbs up songs.

It may be that some of these things have now been fixed but Sonos doesn't give anything away so who knows??
 

Thanks for the specifics! I’ll pass along the interest in the features that don’t exist on Sonos with Google Assistant. 

Commands not working or delayed responses could be symptoms of network or connection trouble.

Number 6 certainly comes up and it’s because the voice assistant uses the same volume that player is set at, with no normalization. So with the Beam, if you have the volume turned up for TV, the voice assistant could be much louder. I’ve passed on some requests to have a separate volume scale for the assistant responses.