@melvimbe -  yeah so I basically added SVC to my kitchen roams (and bare in mind I also have 2 One SLs in my kitchen), and then I asked SVC to play a particular album on the One SLs by using their ‘room’ name, but it said for me to check the room name in the app. I was saying the One SL room name exactly as it appears in the app. My rooms are a little complex as I name them the speaker name, with a hyphen, then the actual room, for example my kitchen One SLs are called ‘Sonos One SL - Kitchen’. Not sure if that is what is confusing it but I would not have thought so lol.

One other thing is with more music services the more precise you need to be. I called for playing “Main Stream” from Sonos Radio HD and it instead played a Mainstream station from Apple Music (my default music service). A quick specification of saying Play Main Stream from Sonos Radio HD fixed it, but you will just have to learn your stations, etc..

Wonder if it would be possible to create specific default stations for each unit. For us, we use Sonos Radio HD (Bedroom, Bathroom & Kitchen) but for my daughter the default on her Roam would be Apple Music. Probably too much but just a thought.

Yeah, I started that way as well but have learned to simplify it solely on the room. In the case of my Kitchen I have a Move as well as two Play 1s (no SVC) and so I have those as just Kitchen and my Move as Kitchen Move. It seems to work pretty well.

I do wonder if my ‘room’ names are a little complex as I don’t just have say ‘kitchen’ or ‘lounge’ 

Maybe I need to re-name them to try that way? But then how does it work if you have a Roam in your actual kitchen plus 2 stereo One SLs? Would one be in Kitchen and the other in say Kitchen 2?

Sorry if I sound silly but I have all my sonos speakers in rooms with their own actual name…… I may need to have a play around with my room names

I would not be surprised if that tripped it up.   I noticed in the list of commands, they had an example where the use the speaker name rather than the room name...’Stop on Roam only’.  They don’t talk about it, and Roam may just happen to be the room name if it was never changed from default, but I got the impression you’re allowed to reference the speaker name in some situations.  That would fit with the attempt to use more natural language perhaps.

I was going to suggest going with Kitchen One and Kitchen Two, but those may be problematic.  I have some named like that, so will have to see if it causes issues.  Also curious to see if it handles named groups well.

I suspect your room names are the issue @SarahN, maybe it’s the hyphen character, you need to include it when you say the name, perhaps?

James talked about this back on page one, and it did work for the Cruise Control station in his test.  I tried it myself and it started playing something from Amazon.  However, when I asked it to play Cruise Control radio, it worked, even though Amazon is my default service.  

As far as having different default stations, seems like it would be do-able since the commands are processed locally on each speaker.  I’m not sure I would want that as it would be confusing to remember the default of which room your in, but it does make sense for kids room.  If you never group your daughters room with other speakers in the home, you could just setup her room as a separate household, with a different default service.  That would cause problems if you’re using Alexa with SVC though, as Alexa can only connect to one Sonos household.

@Ken_Griffiths and @melvimbe - think I found a workaround. So I made a group called Kitchen and just put the One SL pair in it. Just asked sonos (via the roam of course), to play music in the kitchen, and it resumed the queued Amazon music I have on the One SLs, so happy days! 

It’s actually a good naming convention typically, IMO.  If you were building out a smart home, with several different types of smart devices in each room, you have often have to specify the device type/brand in the name to avoid confusion.  For Alexa, I used to name all my speakers with ‘Sonos’ in it, but they changed the icons around, and I know that any name without the device type in it is the Sonos room/speaker by default.

Just tried it also in my lounge which has the Beam home theatre plus a pair of Fives attached to my turntable. Made a group called Lounge, and asked SVC (via the Beam) to play music in the lounge and my Fives started playing their queued music so that is good to know.

I don’t need to re-name my actual ‘room’, just create these groups lol

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.

Interesting; I use Alexa in India with the English Indian option selected and at times I still have to do the Englishman abroad thing in the hope of being understood - speak loudly and slowly in English:-).

But I also find Alexa to be temperamental; there are somedays she just chooses to be difficult. Or so it seems to me.

SVC is only just starting out and I perhaps expect some teething issues, but I must say I do like it’s room grouping/ungrouping features. I’m finding it works really well for ‘a new born baby’.

I like being able to shuffle a queue and love the fact, I can switch on/off TV speech enhancement, night mode and switch easily between TV & music audio on HT products. 

It has certainly come quickly out of its starting blocks and is off to a very good start from the things I’ve been using here so far …and I love the fact it works side-by-side with Amazon Alexa. It’s a good partnership.

It’s just a pity that Google VA does not sit alongside too.

I’ve got a pair of Fives/sub in the same room as the Arc HT. I’ve found that I can ask SVC, via the Arc, to “play music on my Five” and it will correctly play on the Five stereo pair. However, saying “play music on my Fives” more often than not, starts playing music on the Arc HT (with Play:3 surrounds).

If I say “play music on my One”, SVC will ask if I want to play in the Kitchen or Master Bedroom, as both have One stereo pairs, so SVC recognises Sonos Product Names and matches them with Room names.

When I’ve had difficulty getting SVC to play a particular artist, I’ve started the music manually in the app, then asked SVC what’s playing. The pronunciation can differ from Alexa, so having to copy the SVC pronunciation instead. Just tried it with Agnes Obel and got it to work. Not so great with Birdy as Birthday by Anne-Marie started to play instead. I’m Scottish! 󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 

That’s a great idea, play using the app and then ask to get the pronunciation for next time. Of course this then goes out the window when Sonos adds English-British to SVC and I have to relearn, probably better to wait for Sonos. Good to hear that it’s working for you and your Scottish accent, must admit I have friends in Shetland and I can understand them yet cannot work out what the Sousers are saying in Liverpool and been here four years now.