Home Assistant Voice

What makes you think the HA/Sonos market is going to get a lot bigger in the near future?  Increased Matter adoption?  AI?  Increased consumer concern for privacy?  Maybe HA is about to launch a big marketing campaign?  

If you need to ask, you probably are not aware of the huge eco system that it already is.

Point is not a discussion about HA, that to me is off topic here. If you want to discover what it can do or how mature and popular it already is use youtube - or their website - or its community. The question is about Sonos allowing HA as just another voice assistent. The USP for HA is, it's free to run at home and works with an ever growing list of brands of devices.

I want to link (and make findable) the same request as a comment on Tom Conrads' thank you. Maybe they explain it better than me. :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/1m78en8/comment/n4pjb3z/

The subject of the thread is ‘Home Assistant Voice’, I am not sure a discussion about HA is off topic.  

As far as discovering how popular HA is, I literally posted a screenshot of stats from the HA website with that show the total number of HA users and how many of them currently have Sonos integrations. I have a hard time believing that 60k customers is enough to warrant such an integration.  If all .5 Million users suddenly decided to buy Sonos due to a voice integration (which isn’t going to happen) then perhaps it might be worth the integration.  If a Sonos integration suddenly compels a significant number of people to buy both HA and Sonos (which isn’t going to happen) then sure, it would be worth it.

To repeat what I already said, I use HA personally, and do have some automations in place controlling Sonos it works well.  I personally would love if you could use Sonos speakers to control HA automations by voice.  I just don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.

I’m just going to Necro this thread and just say I would love love LOVE to have Home Assistant integrated with Sonos so I could use my own self hosted voice assistant.

You do know that Sonos isn’t going to rely on easily gamed forum thread posts to determine the ROI on supporting a particular voice assistant, right?  

Just leaving a comment to provide user feedback and to display demand for an app. If they don’t look at it, they don’t look at it. It’s not for me to anticipate how they want to determine ROI, I am just leaving feedback in their community forums. If they have a different place to provide that feedback, please let me know.

As it’s necroed already, I’ll join the bandwagon and hype myself for the distant possibility of this happening. 

Sonos sells maybe about 5 million speakers a year with number if sales in decline at the moment. The extra maybe 40 000 to 60 000 new speakers a year isn’t very substantial per se, but most likely it would do the magic of getting goodwill from The Correct People, make Sonos a little more independent and put Sonos again as forerunner for a Connected Smart Home. As a business decision, having couple employees working with HA would be a good one.

Moderator Edit: Corrected spelling mistake of necroed

This would be great! As an avid HA users, if this was added I would buy more Sonos speakers 😀

I would like point out a few key issues with this thread that have been lost in the reeds.  Yes, this thread is about controlling HA automation through the Sonos ecosystem. However:

1. The root of what we are asking is to actually have control over the input which is captured by the integrated mic.  By this, I mean having an option to choose which service that voice information is handed to.  What the OP is actually asking is to have is the option to direct voice responses to HA for processing.  This would be made possible by an open API for third-party integrations.  Leave the coding to interpret voice responses to the TTS of the 3rd party API.  HA users can already use the Sonos integration to control what is played by the speaker.  This is about redirecting the voice responses only.
2. Your stats regarding voice response users is skewed and unfortunate.  I would imagine those stats would be significantly different if you chose to review which platform most users choose to run home automation...and something more than just turning on a couple of light bulbs by saying, “Hey Alexa!”
3. If given the opportunity to choose where their personal information might be sent for processing, I would bet 9/10 users would easily choose a local option whereby they know it is not being captured by untold 3rd-party affiliates.  Nevermind the problem of these large companies enabling their devices to listen and capture at all times, even if the user is unaware.  If you think this doesn’t happen, do a little light research.  There are lawsuits about it in many countries as I type this.
4. The reason Google and Alexa have such a high usage statistics is because for quite a while, they were the *only* TTS models.  There is now competition.  Sonos can’t be expected to adapt every new company out there whom decides to enter this space.  They *can* choose to offer an open API which allows 3rd party startups to develop alternatives and boost the Sonos revenue stream by becoming a market leader and the first to adopt this strategy.  They make good hardware.  Now continue to lead the market in a new dynamic.

The justification for financial benefit is anecdotal but not insignificant.  Sonos, could in truth, position themselves as the market leader in the delivery of AI or merely TTS integration by making a simple change to their strategy.  Offer an open API and let the consumer choose their method of voice interpretation. 

This *will* happen whether Sonos participates or not.  The number of small companies entering the TTS space is fun to watch.  The ability for consumers to design their own ESP32 chips to manage voice response systems at home is becoming easier.  Somebody will enter this space and provide an ecosystem to deliver the response “sounds.”  Sonos is in a position to do so easily and quickly.