Home Assistant Voice

It’s certainly possible your perception of the work involved, as well as the benefit, doesn’t match that of those Program Managers at Sonos. Doesn’t invalidate your input, though. 

For one thing, development is only part of the cost. You also have to consider the cost of testing, support, future development/testing to match home assistant upgrades, integrations with other features, impact on future feature implementation, etc.

If your marketing results in little or no sales due to the small size of the market, how are you actually getting a positive ROI?  In addition, how exactly is implementing a relatively small market voice activation feature going to help overcome a disastrous app update?  Do we really think one feature that appeals to a limited audiience amerliosrates the other far more widespread issue?

Playing devil’s advocate, it was stated up above that they believed that this integration/feature would create a market more than just take advantage of an existing market.  Meaning that people that do not currently have Home Assistant or Sonos  (or have HA but not Sonos) would see this integration and decided that now is the right time to purchase Sonos. 

You could argue that Sonos was created on similar principle.  People were building up their libraries of mp3s, without any really good way to play and control the music without sitting in front of the computer.  There was every reason to believe that the number of consumers with mp3 libraries to grow was only going to go up. At that time, there were no smartphones, no streaming music services, and a good arguement could be made that the existing of mp3 libraries was a big part of why these came into existence as well.

I don’t know that this is a similar situation, especailly since AI processing seems to be more popular than local processing.  Even then the fact that Sonos integrated with Philips Hue shows that they do somewhat believe local processing smart home control has a feature.  That market was something they were interested in.

Create a market/existing market.  Tomayto/Tomahto.  I personally don’t see Sonos driving a market for a particular voice assistant.  But hey, you may be correct.  But that is speculation, something I addressed earlier.

I’d love to be able to use my Sonos Move speakers through my house to connect to my HA (local or cloud) setup. 
Google Assistant is become more and more useless on the Move and hardly ever works and doesn’t understand anything anymore and can’t get it to work reliably. 

I would be in favor of Sonos allowing home assistant voice integration on Sonos speakers, but unfortunately, I don’t think the market is big enough to really warrant the development effort.

 

 

Perhaps you might get more HA/Sonos users if the integration is created, or perhaps a more generic API of sorts would work for other 3rd party voice assistants as well.  It still seems like it would be a lot of cost and dev time on Sonos part for a relatively small set of consumers.

I really don’t think a lot of people understand the ask here. The ask is not for SONOS to build an actual intelligence assistant. 

It's much much simpler than this. Home assistant provides a modular way of handling the intelligence aspect, people are running local language models on OLLAMA to support the ASSIST ecosystem.

The ask is actually ridiculously simple, just provide a simple satellite that

• listen for a wake word
• records the utterance, sends it off to the Home Assistant
• listen for response.

Home assistant will handle everything else,  all of the above is described by the Wyoming protocol, which is well documented and straightforward to wrap in an embedded device (it's designed for thin satellites). Script kids are building satellites to do this, with ESP32 hardware and their dad's 3D printer. I’m sure SONOS engineers wouldn’t need millions to implement the above. If so, they are doomed as a company and it's all irrelevant anyways. 

Also, on the lack of the business case, I don’t think the number of existing SONOS users are very relevant. For example, I got a SONOS ROAM, but I haven’t got the Sonos integration, as it doesn’t play a role in my home assistant setup. If you allowed me to do the above, I’d buy a SONOS for every room for an elegant and wife compatible way of enabling home assistant voice assist throughout my house  (3D printed options looks poop), and probably reply the surround sound in my home entertainment system (for consistency). 

So, the upshot: The target audience isn’t SONOS users wanting to control their speaker via their Home Assistant. The target audience would be Home assistant users using for an elegant satellite to control their home assistant platform, regardless if it currently features a SONOS speaker

The argument of not leaning into this , because there aren't many SONOS HA users, is peculiar. It's like saying, you can only address a demand for, say, keyboards, if the users already have a mouse produced by you. The demand for a way of controlling HA with voice is unrelated to how many people had a demand to stream music to a smart speaker from HA and have chosen to do with with SONOS
 

@melvimbe the development effort is already mostly done, given that integration with Alexa / Google Assistant is already there - wake-up word detection, streaming the microphone data to Amazon/Google and playing back the audio stream response from Amazon/Google. Replace the Amazon/Google endpoints with user-configured ones and that is it, the rest (“AI” or whatever) is handled outside of Sonos.

P.S. I’m one of those “no market” users who just gave up and crafted my own microphone device that streams the data to Home Assistant, which handles the commands then plays the response via Sonos speakers. This is really ugly and I wish I could use the hardware in Sonos devices I have paid for. For those who is in the same unfortunate situation, I could recommend looking at https://echokit.dev/ 

Sonos first introduced voice control when the Sonos One was released in 2017.  At the time, Alexa was built into the Sonos One, and you could control your Sonos speakers with any Alexa enabled device.  They announced that Google Assistant was coming, and it was not officially released until  2019.

Sonos bought Snips in Nov 2019.  At that time, there  weredemos available of a snips voice assistant controlling a Sonos Connect.  Sonos did not introduce their own voice control based on snips tech until May of 2022.

I understand that previous work can be leveraged.  But if much of the work to create Alexa was reused for Google, it’s hard to explain why it took another 2 years.  And if snips was functioning in tests in 2010, why did it take 2.5 years to bring out the finished SVC?  I just don’t think we can assume, that any additional development work regarding voice control is going to be a no brainer.  And yes, I do understand that you have done some voice control work yourself, but I  don’t think that’s equivalent to specific knowledge of Sonos voice control code and what it would take to modify it for HA use.  Maybe you’re right and is an easy change.  I just can’t make that assumption.

​@melvimbe I have experience working at similar companies, the reasons for slow delivery are rarely technical. It could be that Google puts some restrictions (e.g. I read that there is a ban on multiple assistance support: 

), or there is some other licensing issue, or it is simply too expensive and there were negotiations.