"Hey Sonos" - Sonos Voice Assistant

The answer is yes (mostly), but  I believe @Airgetlam was referring to the possibility of Sonos voice assistant doing smart home control without accessing the cloud. I’m not exactly sure how your question relates.

Anyway, it’s my understand that Echo devices can do some smart home control locally, without accessing the cloud for processing.  Amazon sends your voice to the cloud for various reasons, but they have attempted to improve performance by processing locally where they can.  I suspect local processing will increase if the Matter standards lives up to it’s promises.

But back to Sonos doing smart home control, I don’t see them ever getting involved at the level that Amazon, GA, Apple are.  I could see a situation where they pass smart home commands to Home Assistant or some other local hub for processing and execution.  

Huh?  Sonos does have their own streaming service, and Sonos voice would work for this.  It would be processed locally in the sense that a command to a Sonos One  like ‘Hey Sonos, play Rock Road Trip’ would be heard and processed on the Sonos One, then the Sonos One would access the Sonos Radio station and play it….same as it would if you made the request through the Sonos app, API, or pushed the play button.

Existing voice control isn’t good enough for me.  I don’t want to be limited to the streaming services that Amazon, Google, or Apple allows, and I’m assuming Sonos will be able to work with a lot more streaming services at some point.  I want to be able to access TV or aux sources.  I want to be able to add/remove speakers to a group by voice.  

Based on the article, Sonos won’t do smart home control, but you will be able to use Alexa and Sonos voice concurrently.  Google does not allow that, which is the only reason you can’t have Alexa and GA on the same device right now.

I don’t use Sonos Radio, so I did not know that one can make and play one’s own playlists there as one can on Spotify, for example. Or play an album by voice command, as one can do on Spotify. If that can be done via Hey Sonos in future, it ought to be as good as using voice for a local NAS except for relying on the internet connection. And of course, on Sonos having that album in its catalog.

You can’t make playlist or play specific songs, artists, etc with Sonos radio.  Since when is that a requirement to be considered a streaming service?  There are many different radio streams you can select within Sonos Radio, including local radio streams.

I think your point still stands though.  If “Sonos Voice will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and the company’s own Sonos Radio” is a true statement per the Verge, then it’s hard to see technical issues for initiating playback for local library and other streaming services.  There is a relatively small list of key/common words that will be used in the commands, but the list of potential artist, album, genre, song, playlist names you could speak in a command is infinite. 

Given that the news is leaks and not official Sonos information, it’s possible that the author didn’t consider local libraries and left it out of the article.  For streaming services that aren’t yet supported, are their legal reasons?  Maybe Spotify and others need to signoff that they are ok with their services being presented and controlled in this manner?  I really don’t know.

Even a radio station on Tune In is a streaming service, but only the likes of Spotify replicate what a local NAS does, subject to album availability of course, but the latter is getting to be a rare issue as music libraries keep increasing in size. If Sonos Radio cannot do all that Amazon Music/Apple Music/Spotify can do for music play, then for a company that is stated to be in the music business, it does not quite cut the mustard, and people will still prefer the full featured services. 

The point then is that for playing the fully featured streaming services, Hey Sonos will involve the same amount of server to server cloud interfacing needs as for Alexa or Hey Google, and it would be interesting to know how Hey Sonos would do this job better even on mic equipped Sonos players, when playing Amazon Music and similar, as compared to Alexa or Hey Google today that gets done via the respective integrations with Sonos on mic equipped players. Both will need Sonos servers to interface with those of Amazon or Google.

On the other hand, Hey Sonos would not involve leaving Sonos servers if Sonos Music or local NAS was the target, and it remains to be seen to what extent this more streamlined communication will translate into better user music play experience.

That’s not the case actually.  The benefit of Sonos radio is that it’s curated playlists, so I’m hearing songs and artist I may not be aware of.  And of course, I dont really need to think about what song, artist, album I want to listen to next, or make a playlist, etc. I was doubtful of the benefit of such a service at first, but I find that I like listening this way quite often.  Theoretically, Amazon, Sirius XM, and Pandora (other services I use) should be able to provide the same service...but I find that they tend to be repetitive and I just don’t enjoy it as much.  It’s not a replacement for streaming services wherne I can make more direct requests, but it is a nice additional service. But that’s just me, and beside the point.

Wrong.  As the article has stated, your voice command is processed locally with Sonos voice.  It is not sent to a cloud service for processing.  So the Sonos speaker in question can make the request to play music from Amazon or one of the other services without going through a Sonos server.   It’s really not any different then if you used the Sonos app to request music from Amazon to play on Sonos.  That doesn’t go through a Sonos cloud service either.

If voice can be used for local NAS, there would be no need to even connect to an outside server, Sonos or otherwise, at all.

There is nothing unique about curated playlists, being a part of the streaming services that offer more than Sonos Radio by way of also allowing self curated playlists and albums on demand. Apple claims to have human curated playlists and Spotify may use homonculi for all I know. I find neither to be repetitive, but I also need their album/song on demand feature from which I can make my own playlists that allow me to keep local NAS as just a standby. Of course there may be preferences for Sonos humans/homonculi over those of Apple/Spotify etc, but that is a subjective thing.

As to the rest, to use that horrible phrase, my bad. But then that should mean that if I had a Sonos player with a built in mic and the software version to come on S2 that has Hey Sonos on it, I should be able use voice command - even if restricted to US English in the beginning - on that Sonos player in India/elsewhere from the same time and to the same extent it can be so used in the US? If yes, that would be progress welcomed globally seeing that many that pay the same price for the device do not get all its features.

And then one would think that having local NAS control via the same voice command process should also be available...but time will tell as to that.