Multiple Accounts and Google Assistant

BUMP BUMP.

Same problem here… I waited for 2 years to get the google assistant support in Italy on my sonos One (it should be available from the beginning, according to sonos...) and now I can’t use it with different voice profiles? What’s the point of that? If my wife invokes spotify thru sonos one it uses my spotify account and not her account, it’s unusable!

Hmm. At my house we haven’t decided which assistant to go with (we use both). The one nice thing about Alexa is that you can, in the Alexa app, indicate which speakers (plural, and can be anywhere in the house) are the default speakers for a room. 

Google can’t do that (Sonos not allowed as default speaker, and you have to say which room, which means no multiple speaker unless stereo pair, etc) BUT Google (at least when using their own speakers) will voice match which spotify account, which we use (since we are on a family account) but I haven’t been able to do that on Alexa (you have to manually switch accounts, at least last time I checked).

For the Google side I would need them to solve the multi-voice profile and the ability to set multiple default speakers for a room to make the Google side win out. 

I’m curious if this purely a Sonos issue, probably more complicated than that. Wouldn’t be surprised if this requires Google to make updates too.

don’t try to find an excuse for sonos, the issue is clearly on their side, not google.

Google mini devices with assistant works flawlessy, detecting voices correctly and switching music services according to the talking users.

Sonos doesn’t.

So it’s a bad implementation by sonos, maybe the reason is that sonos speakers are binded to the “owner” account and the authentication occurs between the sonos owners account and the google owners account… I hope it’s not the case, because if this is the reason, is a really bad implementation choice and very difficult to fix.

No excuses for Sonos, but these things always end up being more complicated and definitely depend on the APIs provided by Google and Amazon. Like I said, for me on the Google side more than one thing needs to be updated.  Generally Google and Amazon are getting remarkably close in the key areas for me but neither are 100% there (Amazon is slightly closer) . Regardless, I’d love for Sonos to be 100% equivalent to the native devices because I’d love to replace almost all of my Echos and Home Minis with Ones. Hope the platform holders and Sonos can work it out.

The API’s works good for other non-google speaker, (jbl i.e.) sonos doesn’t :)

I bought sonos one to have a better sound device than google/alexa and I ended up with a non-assistant device in both scenario. As Google assistant device it doesn’t recognize users, as alexa speaker in Italy we don’t have household and sonos recognize correctly the voices, but can’t use a different spotify account (and this is amazon fault)

The complete lack of any response from the Sonos devs made my frustration peak and so I have had to move on. I sold off all of my Sonos Ones and purchased a LG xBoom WK7. Here is a quick review for those considering the same move.

I tested both side by side playing music via Spotify. First impression, the WK7 is about the same size which is good, its a little bit taller, but the footprint is pretty much the same. Sound quality wise, the Sonos One is better, but the WK7 does a really job of competing against it.

Vocals and mids are on par with the Sonos One. The WK7’s bass is a bit muddy, there is better clarity and seperation with the bass on the Sonos One.

Only other thing I noticed was volume. The Sonos One at around 2/3 volume was on par with the WK7 at full volume. But the WK7 at full volume is still nice and clear, no distortion which makes me think it was a casting limitation, only later did I realise I was using Spotify Connect to stream to the Sonos and Google Cast to stream to the WK7.

But even if the volume on the WK7 does not reach the same volume as the Sonos, the more competitve price makes putting two WK7s in a stereo pair much easier on a reasonable budget. If you need a lot of volume.

The Sonos is still the gold standard for audio quality in this market category. The LG WK7 gives it a good run for its money and once you factor in that the WK7 runs Google Assistant natively, it becomes a much easier choice. The WK7 gives you all the functionality you would from Google branded speakers. I do not regret my change at all in the end.

Sonos, any update regarding support for multiple voice profiles via GA integration?  Why is this topic being ignored?

Sonos rarely, if ever, comment on their development roadmap and as this one likely involves working with partners, it may also depend on some development by the partner too. I am sure Sonos are aware of this requested feature, but I’m not so sure they will make any advanced announcement until such a feature is fully tested/ready, or about to launch. (if that is their plan?)

I think it’s perhaps a case of ‘wait and see’ what each new update may bring to the platform.

At a minimum it would be nice to see some acknowledgement. 

This is not a good workaround, nor should it seem like I am letting Sonos off the hook with this (because it's absurd that they don't support voice recognition), if you have a Google home mini already, you can put it in the same room as the Sonos, disable the assistant on the Sonos, and use the mini to make the Sonos play. Basically saying " Hey Google, play X on Y" where X is your music choice and Y is the name of the Sonos target speaker you want. That way the Google home is handling the assistant stuff and the Sonos is just doing what it does. (Or you can set the Sonos as the default play device for music requests from that Google mini in the Google home app)

Totally defeats the purpose of GA on Sonos, but it works. Like I said, bad workaround, and  I'm not letting Sonos off the hook but it makes the best of a bad situation.