Home Assistant Voice

Opening Sonos to OpenHome + Home Assistant voice would rebuild trust, add privacy, and let users enjoy true flexibility with already great-sounding hardware.

Also not about Home Assistant per sé, but Google Assistant is the only assistant that supports many languages. Since Sonos seems to have left/was left behind by Google, another asistant that works with a lot of languages would be useful to have. I do see a responsibility for Sonos to not leave the people now helped by Google behind.

For me it would be best if Sonos would repair their relations with Google/Google repair their realtions with Sonos. I would like GA to work better on Sonos and since Google is changing GA to Gemini see a dark future for GA on Sonos - that I enjoy using.

Yes, but the marketing page doesn’t give important details, such as whether the hue hub can control other Matter devices.  I get the impression that all that’s really happening is that your Hue devices can be controlled by a Matter controller.   That’s not very useful with SVC if you’re hoping to control non-Hue products.

HA is here to stay partly because it has no developers to pay, or anything a software company would have to be concerned about, and partly because it’s way too big for any other competing freeware version to rise up.  That’s not meant to be a knock on them, I’m just saying that the fact that they still exist doesn’t mean that it’s a large market of users to be captured.

I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t make the request.  What happens with a lot of these requests is people state that they are confident it would bring in a lot of new sales, etc, and everyone  else thinks like them, when the reality is that they do not speak for others.   is that a big deal?   Perhaps not, but I also think it’s helpful for the community to consider if the request is likely to happen or not.

That said, I am surprised that Sonos is even working with Hue.

There is a surprising amount of lack of awareness of how much initiative/momentum does Home Assistant have (lol Windows Mobile, lol 19% Coratana market share) in the home automation area.

Here’s a thousand words for you Guys:

red is Google Home, blue is Home Assistant, yellow is Alexa

Absolute numbers cannot be derived from Google Trends (Home Assistant is definitely inflated in search results due to the nature of being a power user platform; Alexa definitely isn’t THAT much less popular then Google Home either).

But the relative trends in time CAN be derived, and these are massive.

If you want more tangible, but anegdotical “proof”… look up how the content of home automation channels on youtube changed over the past two years. Or how many companies are currently doing “works with Home Assistant” certifications.

When the numbers aren’t there, then fudge the numbers by looking at trends.  Sonos will support Home Assistant when there are enough Home Assistant users to support the development and maintenance effort required.  No trend, or momentum, or article, or YouTube videos, or call to arms to one-and-done post here at Sonos.com is going to change that.

Not that I’m objective, but this is already a MUCH more solid grounding in numbers than anything you personally provided in this thread.

Unless you really believe that Cortana has 19% of the voice assistant market based on the same data source. Which I’m going to go on a limb here, and for your sake simply assume you actually don’t.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with trend analysis over a decade. To the contrary - it’s extremely useful in strategic planning. And if you think otherwise - please do actually lay down the argumentation instead of running into ridicule. Or let me put it differently: do you believe a company that only reacts reactively to market conditions is well-managed?

Here you have HA at 10% (1/3 of Google at #1 - with again much worse trends, which again obviously matter tremendously in business):
https://sqmagazine.co.uk/smart-home-statistics

You are trying to be the Guy speaking “harsh truths” (to an audience that actually does seem to think in terms of markets and bottom lines), but you end up repetitively shoehorning a ridiculously unsubstantiated comparison to Windows Mobile (which HA has already surpassed in market share several times) and the “one-and-done” “insult” that I’m not even sure what is supposed to prove (sorry-not-sorry for not having 30k posts on a audio-brand forum, that I’m ignoring until discussion touches upon an actual pain-point of mine).

I don't know what's so painful about me stating that Sonos will support something if and when it has the market size to justify the expense of implementing and maintaining the code.  It's basic business, but it seems to really, really strike a nerve.

I created the very first speech integration for Sonos, an Alexa skill called “My Speaker”. There is nothing stopping anyone else doing something similar to integrate Sonos with any voice service.

You do need a “server” of some kind running locally, and HA has one of those (I didn’t, I had to subvert background processes on the mobile devices which was a problem).

The hardest problem for voice is recognizing artist/album/track names as such. eg “play the smashing pumpkins” - something has to know that is an Artist name, compared to album or track names. The Alexa infrastructure did this quite well, though I did need a lookup table for some weird artist spellings.

I long retired my service for reasons of cost, and my wife still complains about its loss. SVC is pretty terrible and no substitue for her.

According to the Home Assistant website, there are ~500k total Home Assistant installations, with ~64k of those with Sonos integrations. Does that line up with your data source?  I can’t tell since your data only states of percentage without giving any info on the size of the market for ‘Smart Home Management Apps’.  I don’t have any reason to believe the HA is under reporting the number of installations though.

The request is about having SVC control other smart devices via HA, it’s not about controlling Sonos via some other voice assistant.  HA already has their own voice assistant, that may already be able to control Sonos devices. The reason, I would assume, that people are asking for SVC to control smart home devices is so that they do not have to buy another voice device for rooms they already have Sonos speakers in.