Introducing Sonos Voice Control

Played around with it a bit this morning.  Not enough to really get anything close to a full impression.  Being able to group rooms by voice is probably going to be my favorite feature.  It also does seem like it understand natural language a bit better.

It’s going to take a little mental training to get used to a new voice assistance.  At least twice, I said ‘Hey Google’ instead of ‘Hey Sonos’.

@James L. Just to confirm can you have Alexa and sonos Voice enabled at the same time? I use Alexa to control my lights etc, so wouldnt want to lost that function

Yes, absolutely 😊

@James L.

When using SVC with a streaming service are the played tracks fed back to the streaming service so it updates its recommendations?

Each music service handles playback on external platforms, such as Sonos, in their own way.

But, yes, the service will know the tracks that have been played via Sonos Voice Control in the same way they’ll know if a track has been played through the Sonos app.

Many thanks

So a few thoughts - 

I like it overall.

It turns on the TV and turns it back off again via the Beam Gen 2 (Google assistant would only ever turn the TV off, never on).

It plays or pauses bluetooth streams on my 2 grouped Roams.

It will resume playing my Audible book which I have always queued on my Move.

It works nice and quickly.

Things it does not seem to do (unless I’m doing something wrong) =

Does not seem able to pause my Audible book on my Move (says nothing is playing?)

Cannot see a way of using a voice enabled speaker to play music on a non voice enabled speaker. for example I have my Roams in the kitchen which are used a lot for bluetoothing in a group as one is one end of the dining kitchen and the other is the other end. I also have 2 One SLs stereo paired but if I try to ask a Roam to play music on the One SLs it does not work (maybe that’s something it’s unable to do right now?)

Any thoughts?

I only played with this briefly before heading out to work this morning, but I was able to use the Roams mic to command a room that had no mics in it.  Of course, I did have to name the room in my command.  Also, I just raised the volume, didn’t initiate playback, so maybe that makes a difference.

It would be really nice if you could tie a Roam, or any speaker really to default to playback in a different room, so you wouldn’t have to add the room name.   It’s not as ideal as an echo dot or echo show, primarily due to cost, but it would make it easier to add voice to those rooms that have no mic’d speakers.  You could even still make SVC commands to the Roam/speaker itself by adding the ‘here’.

Either way, I plan on using a Roam outside near the pool where outdoor speakers are powered by Amp.  It won’t matter if the Roam gets splashed or even falls in.

Are you including the One SLs ‘Room’ name in your instruction and are all devices in the same Household on the same subnet. Example:

"Hey Sonos, play music in/on Kitchen” ..  (instruction given to a Sonos Roam here called ‘Vortex’)

The above example is working for me - ‘Kitchen’ is a stereo pair of One SL’s and begins playing music. I was also able to stop the music in the Kitchen from the Roam too. 

Here’s what’s kind of slick for non compatible speakers; I just asked it to move my music to those speakers. Was listening on my Beam (gen 1) in the BR and was going to the office. Just said “Hey Sonos, move music to Office” and Giancarlo said, “Moving music to the Office” and there it was. That’s odd that it doesn’t work for you; I just tested it cold by going in the BR and asking it to play in the Office and it worked. Also, heads up be careful because when I did that I started with Hey, Sonos Move instead of Play and it transferred the show my daughter was watching in the basement Arc to my BR Beam.