Night Mode & Speech Enhancement Control via Harmony 700 (or any IR remote)

Have you considered using a voice assistant like Alexa or Sonos Voice Control?

• “Alexa, switch to Speech Enhancement mode in the Living Room.”
• “Alexa, switch to Night Sound mode in the Living Room.”
• “Hey Sonos, turn on Night Sound.”
• "Hey Sonos, turn Speech Enhancement on."

Thanks for the suggestion(s).  I have considered enabling the Sonos voice assistant, but I generally don’t like the idea of always-listening microphones (for privacy reasons), and don’t use voice commanding anywhere else in my household.

You also have the competing requirements of “I want to turn on Night Mode to make the space quieter for everyone else in the room, including sleeping adults/babies/pets” and “I need to use my loud male voice to turn on Night Mode on the TV”.

Moreover, the Harmony remote ecosystem has support for the Sonos line of products, but is currently limited to the four commands Sonos provides as user-facing direct IR commands: volume up/down, input, and mute… why not just add a few more in there, like these two?  As far as I know, Sonos must first add these additional IR commands, then Harmony can include them in their ecosystem.

With respect to voice commands Sonos Voice Control is done locally. Privacy issues are minimal, but you need to talk to BEAM. Alexa can use their small, inexpensive units that can be placed near your favorite chair — hopefully not requiring you to “speak up”.

Oh, that’s good to know that Sonos voice commanding is done locally, thanks for that info.

However, “Sonos, turn on Night Mode” sounds like an SNL skit, where the frustrated user proceeds to scream at the speaker to get things to work.

I never thought of this as a problem since I don’t have Sonos on my phone which I rarely have handy but I do have it on my tablet connection, one of which is almost always handy.

Yes I have too many of them, and some are so old they are locked on old Sonos controller software. The spare bath just got upgraded to an obsolete Ipod, handy for controlling the spare Beam that ended up in there when I got my Arc.

I too used to tolerate multiple remotes to control the TV/Bluray/Stereo/Squeezebox/CDPlayer/Roku and now Sonos in my living room, but now having everything working with a single Harmony 700, I find reaching for a second device intolerable enough to simply not incorporate it into the entertainment system.  If Sonos doesn’t add more IR controllable functionality, I think I’m leaning towards scrapping it.  The single Harmony remote makes everything so easy and simple (I do the heavy lifting of configuring the Harmony, and the family just uses it and I hear no complaints!)  The Beam Gen 2 sounds good enough, but not so good that I’m willing to overlook (and fight through) these annoyances (for me at least).

I don’t think that SONOS will ever add the commands that you want. Also your Harmony is on borrowed time because Logitech is done with it.

Right, borrowed time, which is why almost every TV and A/V component available for purchase today includes a remote with IR blaster.