At launch, Sonos Voice will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and the company’s own Sonos Radio. Spotify and Google’s YouTube Music aren’t yet on board.

I don’t like this part.  It could be a legal/license reason.  If that’s the case then, don’t see a reason where local library or aux input wouldn’t work. I find this a little odd, since services are supported through app and API already.  Why is voice control different?  If it’s technical reasons, then it means it could be awhile before your more obscure streaming source are supported.

Also needs to support control features Alexa and GA don’t do, like changing rooms in the group mid stream, control volume of different rooms in a group...

In my 16 years of Sonos ownership, this would have to come close to the dumbest and most wasteful thing Sonos management have decided to spend their time and resources on. Stability of the system has gotten worse in recent years, yet they want to have a “biggest d**k” contest with the major players in the ever expanding smart home arena. Frankly, from my perspective, unless it will be available across all Sonos devices and can control accessories in my smart home, it will be useless.

…and as I wrote a year ago, it is more obvious than ever that the Five should have been called the Five SL

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

This is a pretty critical reaction for something that hasn’t been released to the general public yet. Would you feel the same if Sonos Voice provides a much better voice assistant experience with Sonos than Alexa and Google Assistant currently provides? What if Sonos Voice allows new commands that aren’t currently available with Alexa and GA? Would it still be useless to you?

Didn't ‘t Sonos purchase a voice interpreting company a couple of years ago? Ah, here it is. Probably years of work involved, especially to do the processing locally, rather than on a cloud. Which is also probably why it won’t read my local library data, since it doesn’t mention local data in that article, just streaming companies. In order to maintain privacy, that is fine, as far as I’m concerned. 

I’ve not experienced any diminution of stability over the time years that I’ve operated my Sonos system, once I figured out what network issues I had, the system has been rock solid. Does what it is designed to do, and without any issues. 

I would think the engineers that have been working on a voice system would not be the same folks focused on stability issues, though. Differing skill sets, doing voice work versus doing networking, or API work. 

Sonos is, from what I can tell, focussing on music, and not entire home control with their voice assistant. In fact, to control the entire home, they’d have to reference cloud data to engage with the other systems, there’s just no way for all of that to be stored locally, in my opinion. 

Probably. Voice control of music is good enough as it is. Will the Sonos voice assistant control my smart home or will I be able to install multiple assistants? Based on the Verge article and previous commentary, I very much doubt it.

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah…"it must be your network". I hear this all the time in many forums and it doesn’t help keep customers.

One company, one bucket of money, and this is just another distraction. Frankly, you are deluding yourself if you think they are focusing on music, and I for one think they would be a better company with a better offering if they had. They hit a fork in the road twice: once when they decided to allow WiFi-only connections instead of sticking with SonosNet, and again when they thought about jumping into the AV. Personally, I think they might have been a better music company if they had chosen the other pathway on both those occasions.

With regards to privacy: you are participating in social media, so you have already opened the door to having less. In this case it is just a cloak in which Sonos management can drape themselves in their ongoing fight with the majors.

Is not this engagement in the cloud with Amazon necessary for the Sonos Alexa integration to take place, regardless of whether Echo devices or Sonos speakers with mic are used?

I don't also see how that would change with this feature which makes sense only if Sonos were to offer a streaming service of their own.

The other big USP for the feature will be if it can fully control music play via local NAS.

No mention of what languages this will be available in?

+1 for voice control of local libraries. C’mon Sonos, make it happen!

Also, the ability to say “Play album (or playlist) X, starting at track Y” would be great, instead of starting the album / playlist and having to keep saying “Skip Track” until you get to the part of the album / playlist you want.

Article said it’s released in the US only June 1st, other countries to follow.  I would assume that means English.

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.