Sonos as default speaker for music?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
May 15, 2019
11 replies
4234 views

After the outage earlier today I finally have everything working and I couldn't be happier (I can play, pause and change volume on my old Play 3s with my voice which is all I wanted for two years now).

But it's a little unfortunate that in a room with (1) a Google home and (2) a sonos speaker, I still have to append "on the kitchen Sonos" to my requests to begin playing music (otherwise the music plays on the answering Google device).

The Google home app lets you configure what the default device is for playing music, and it lists not only my various Google speakers but also my vizio TVs on the network, etc., but it strangely doesn't list my sonos speakers. Is there a way to make this happen?

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Best answer by melvimbe

My knowledge on all things Google isn't as high as many others, but is the default music device setup for Google using chromecast? If that's the case, then in order for the default music speaker configuration to work, one of two things would need to happen.

1 - Google needs to build out the functionality so that the default music device setup also works for speakers that will receive instructions through their API to stream directly. This is likely what happens now, as it does with Alexa. Google cloud recognizes that the command to play music for a Sonos speaker, passes it to the Sonos cloud, that then passes the command to your home speakers. Google just needs to build in a feature for this.

2 - Sonos needs to support chromecast. I am honestly a littly fuzzy on this as I'm not quite sure chromecast would stream from your phone/table/google home product to the music player, Sonos in this case, or if it only passes on instructions for the music player to stream directly from the source. The first is pretty much what bluetooth and airplay 2 does, the second is how Alexa cast and casting from Spotify, Pandora, etc does with Sonos.

I can see where Sonos may prefer option 1, as it seems easier from a technical point of view, and not all of Sonos speakers have the hardware to support chromecast I'd guess. But Google might lack the motivation to do this. It did take Amazon over a year to get it done.

So while it seems like a pretty simple feature to customers, and absolutely something customers are justified in wanting and expecting, it may not be that simple to get done. But this is just my speculation.

Now, I'm going to go do some research on chromecast.

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B

BillWelense

Contributor I

Does anyone who has done the Alexa integration know if this has been implemented already for Alexa?

Yes, Alexa has a feature called "Preferred Speakers" and your Sonos speakers will show up in there. You can select one or more of your Sonos speakers, and whenever you speak to the Echo Dot, it will playback on the selected Sonos speaker(s).

We have an open concept living room / dining room / kitchen, with an Echo Dot in the middle of the space, and a Playbase in our living room, and an older Play:1 in the dining room. Whenever we say "Alexa, play ____," to the Echo Dot, the music will always start playing back on both the dining room Play:1 and the Playbase connected to the TV. This is great, because whenever we watch TV, the Playbase always becomes ungrouped from the dining room Play:1, and whenever we listen to music / news / podcasts, we always want it to play on both speakers.

Google has a similar feature where you can set the default playback speaker for their Assistant hardware devices, but Sonos speakers don't show up in the list. Personally, I don't care about grouping Sonos speakers with other Google Cast-enabled speakers, I just want to be able to choose one / several / all of my Sonos speakers.

In our home, we really do use this feature all the time with Alexa on the Echo Dot, and I sorely wish the Google Assistant + Sonos integration had it too — I'd much rather use Google's ecosystem for a variety of reasons.

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