Retired Community Manager

Introducing Sonos Voice Control

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Hi Sonos Community members!

Today, we introduce the first voice experience created purely for listening on Sonos. Designed with privacy at its core, Sonos Voice Control is the simplest way to control your music, offering complete command of your Sonos system using only your voice.

Sonos Voice Control works on every voice-capable Sonos speaker, processing requests entirely on the device.

No audio or transcript is sent to the cloud, stored, listened to or read by anyone.

Available on new voice capable products and as a free update for existing customers, Sonos Voice Control is compatible with Sonos Radio, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora at launch. More services and markets will follow.

Fast, accurate control of your music and your Sonos System

Sonos Voice Control finds the music you want to listen to, processing requests entirely on the device. Local processing delivers faster response times, and effortless follow-ups.

All you need is one “Hey Sonos” and you can follow up without the need for additional wake-words.

Just like the Sonos app, you can control music and speakers in any room, easily move music around the home, save and like your favorite songs to your personal music library and more.

Natural conversation with Giancarlo Esposito

Sonos Voice Control understands the nuance of human communication and will respond to natural commands like “turn it up!”. After a careful search, Sonos chose award-winning actor Giancarlo Esposito - best known for his roles in Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and The Mandalorian - to deliver a familiar voice for US customers. With careful recording, advanced processing and mastering, the voice is natural, unobtrusive, yet confident and engaging.

Sonos’ first voice will be joined by others over time as Sonos continues to expand the experience to new people and places.

Sonos Voice Control is available in the US starting June 1 and in France later this year, with additional markets to follow.

Read the full press release on Sonos Voice Control here.

Sonos Voice Control

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melvimbe

Thought this was interesting, although I want to hear more examples.

Danny

106rallye

Sounds great! Now I hope that there will also be a version in Dutch!

Jeffrey_35

Headliner III

One snippet of the response. I want more. I think that Sonos should Tweet out a snippet phrase a day.

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

melvimbe

And… I thought this engadget article was interesting, particularly the last couple paragraphs regard performance and choice of Esposito as the voice. While I like the choice, it’s bold in the sense that Apple/Google/Amazon all went with a female voice that isn’t well known. And there, is always the outside chance that Esposito does something that people don’t like, and no longer want to hear his voice. True that you won’t hear his voice as much as other voice assistants, and I hope there are other voices available in English at some point.

Danny

B

beynym

World-Class Superstar

Sounds great! Now I hope that there will also be a version in Dutch!

Misschien met de stem van Maarten van Rossum… 😏

A

andin

Lyricist II

Is it really only going to be launching in the US on 1st June, and not any other English speaking countries?

Looking forward to trying it in the UK.

melvimbe

Is it really only going to be launching in the US on 1st June, and not any other English speaking countries?

Looking forward to trying it in the UK.

Unfortunately, it’s not just about getting it to technically work in a language, but dealing with all the legalities and regulations each country has.

Danny

arcadelt

Enthusiast I

Designed long before there was knowledge about how such a system would potentially work. Seems like blaming Sonos for not allowing the PLAYBAR to have AirPlay 2.

That’s a pretty I’ll informed response. It’s not like Sonos products didn’t already support voice assistants when the Five [and even the Play:5 (Gen 2] was released.

Pretty sure @Airgetlam is stating that the basic design of the play:5 and Five didn’t change, they only upgraded the memory other parts to modernize it. Sonos didn’t change the speaker layout or the exterior housing to make room for mics and all that that entails...as well as testing, etc. Whether the cost of additional development and such would have been worth it throw in mics, or what Sonos may have planned to address that in the future...I have no idea.

Also pretty sure the Play:5 (gen 2 was released years before Sonos One. It certainly wasn’t after.

Fair call on the Play:5 (Gen 2), which was released about two years earlier than the One. However, given the shape and size of the Play:1 and One are similar, and they managed to squeeze in voice assistant support as part of that transition, I maintain there was no reason they couldn’t have accommodated the hardware for voice assistant support in the Five, and I said so at the time:

The One needed to have voice control. No way around it in that case, since they needed a base/flagship device with voice control. And you can’t assume that there was physical space in the Play:5/Five because there was physical space in the One/Play:1. For one thing, the top of the One/Play:1 is flat, which works find for mics. The top of the Play:5/Five is not, which probably isn’t good for mics. They would have had to do more of a redesign. I’m not say that the extra dev costs and such would definitely not be worth it, but way too much stuff unknown to me definitely say it was a stupid move.

Not sure why you feel the need to justify their choice? It was a dumb decision to not include assistant capabilities in the Five at the time it was released or since, and it is even dumber now that they are developing their own assistant.

T

Talvish

Enthusiast II

While I know Spotify isn’t supported at the moment, I’m curious how it will work in my situation when it does . . .

Our house has a Spotify Family account where each person has their own Spotify login. When Spotify is supported, will Sonos support multiple user ‘voice prints’ and map them to the appropriate Spotify account instances on the Sonos? Sonos does already support having multiple instances of a service today, so it has at least part of the solution. And technically it could support this notion on any music service, not just Spotify.

This is highly desired so my Spotify account isn’t ‘polluted’ by what my wife and kids listen to 🙂 and to support multiple streams playing at the same time by different people through-out the house.

Google Home can do this via voice prints and auto-choose the right Spotify account (at least on Nest/Home devices, never tried on the Sonos). Alexa requires you to ask it to ‘switch profiles’ (and that does work on Sonos).

K

Kumar

Is it really only going to be launching in the US on 1st June, and not any other English speaking countries?

Looking forward to trying it in the UK.

Interesting; I thought this would be baked into the version update to S2; updates that have been made available globally at the same time till now, as far as I know. Now this practice will change?

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