Introducing Sonos Voice Control

It is puzzling. Sonos made some lame excuse that audiophiles don’t use voice control. Well audiophiles don’t use anything Sonos. 

I am very hopefully that SVC will eventually allow access to my local library.  Much of the music I listen to isn’t available on the popular streaming services.  I understand that on initial launch, they manage risk by trimming down the scope of the release, but local library access would be the most compelling reason for me to use SVC.  As stated on a post earlier, the app already has this, unlike the Alexa app, so I remain optimistic.

@Ken_Griffiths : Does SVC understand the many accents of English in the UK as well as Alexa does ( per what you said some time ago about Alexa) with just the SVC response for now being restricted to US accented English?

Did Sonos say it in so many words?! 

On this forum there are some like me that have come to Sonos after many years spent in the audiophile madness and found that the best of Sonos can hold its own against many “audiophile” set ups; indeed there are many of the latter that sound worse than, for example, a well set up and tuned 5 pair + Sub system. I would not accept voice control as being the only way to control the system, but I definitely find voice control as a very useful adjunct to the usual ways of controlling it.

If Sonos is going to shoot itself in the foot in this manner by making such statements, we should stop proclaiming what we believe about Sonos sound quality!

I’ve no idea Kumar, or how to find out the answer to that question, unless those around the UK start to mention such things online. I can say that so far the family and I are not seeing any difficulties with the service.

Specifically from Scotland/Ireland? Australia outside the UK?!

I suspect that for the limited set of commands it accepts, SVC may have a wide range of English accents it can cope with, with the responses being limited to US English for now.

Yes, I think we may not see any feedback from around the UK as it’s the Queens Platinum Jubilee celebrations starting yesterday, so a good many people will be on holiday and/or out and about.

As you say though the syntax is limited to Sonos playback and control, so it shouldn’t present too many difficulties, I guess.

I’ve just seen mostly favourable comments, so far, with one exception and that was some users asking for voice control of their local library, which mostly works in any case, once the tracks have been manually loaded to a ‘room’ queue.

I only discovered this was available yesterday - I thought it was going to take longer to get to the UK.  So I installed it immediately.  Adding it was much easier than adding in Alexa or Google assist, although the UI was a bit clumsy with VoiceOver on iPhone, but not that hard.

The voice is absolutely fantastic.  It’s so nice to have a change from the slightly dystopian sounding voices the other assistants use.  Possibly the only voice with actual character.  I love it.

I need to spend some more time with it, but I didn’t always find it very responsive.  Quite often I was saying “Hey Sonos...” and it would just be silent after I ask the command.  I’d try again and it worked.  On the whole it seemed to work well every other time.  Not sure if maybe some of this is follow-on mode or something.

I use Alexa and Google on my Sonos speakers and find Alexa is much, much better.  Google regularly doesn’t respond to me or gets it wrong.  I’d say the Sonos one feels about as responsive as Google on my initial tests, but hopefully this will improve.  Or maybe I just need to get used to it.

What I did find weird is that you get the little chime noises just before the voice responds to you, rather than as an indication that it is listening.  So if I say Hey Sonos, I’ve no idea if it’s heard me so I just have to carry on.  Then I get chimes and the answer.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to use the room grouping commands.  I’m not sure if there’s a way for Sonos to tell you what rooms are in the current group.  I did try to get the current speaker in the same group as everything else but wasn’t sure how to do it.  Asking it to remove a room from a group, however, did work well.

It’s a shame that Google refuse to share the voice control space with Sonos.  I will be replacing Google with Alexa on at least one speaker so I can put Sonos on it too.

When I first heard this announced I did wonder what the point of it was, but now I’ve played with it I’m quite excited about what this can offer.  I hope Spotify support comes soon then it could really come into its own for me.  I’d love to be able to use it as my main way of the speakers.  As Sonos refuse to make the Mac controller accessible, maybe something like this is the future instead.

Anyway, keep up the good work - can’t wait to hear what comes next.

Yes, in response to the quoted part of your post above, the tone, or ‘earcon’, does also seem to me to be in the wrong place - it’s not a tone that responds to the ‘Hey Sonos’ wake words, but more an acknowledgment that it has heard the voice instruction, which is presently unlike any other voice assistant services - I would personally prefer the ‘earcon’ as an acknowledgment that SVC has heard the ‘Hey Sonos’ wake words, rather than the voice instruction.

I’m also not a fan of the ‘earcon’ tone itself, it just seems a little abrupt to me. I guess we all have such personal things about Apps/features that we would like to see changed and I’m not overly complaining here, but it would not have been my personal earcon choice.

So my hope is Sonos will eventually allow the earcon to be changed, and/or switched to a wake-word acknowledgment tone instead … or better still … to allow the user to disable it altogether.

Both Alexa and Google allow for their ‘earcon’ to be disabled, so we will have to wait and see if Sonos provide that for their own voice service too.

Regarding SVC understanding UK persons… Myself and family are from the London Shires so very typical of the London area, no slang and where we currently live speak (so we have been told) speak very nicely and clear.

SVC however does not understand us very well and either we get total silence after the acknowledgment tone or the incorrect artist playing. Probably about 70% success rate at the moment and then asking Alexa to play artists rather than preserving with SVC.

For the life of me I cannot get Agnes Obel to play or Birdy, which results in Noel Gallagher’s band playing.