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Sonos Voice Assistant & Home Theater OS Launching With Matter This Fall?

  • 27 March 2022
  • 1 reply
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This is a completely speculative question that can’t be confirmed yet but I’m just wondering if people think it’s possible. Based upon what I’ve seen and what’s coming up, it really looks like a strong possibility to me.

Sonos previously purchased a voice assistant company called Snip a while back and it’s currently looking to hire someone to lead their Home Theater OS department. While thinking about how they could then use their own voice assistant to control not just music but TVs as well, I also remembered that Matter is being delayed to this Fall as well.

Suddenly this all made me realize something. What if Sonos is going to take advantage of this and create not just a music/tv voice assistant but a full blown home voice assistant that suddenly will have access to tons of Matter compatible devices this Fall, thus making Sonos no longer dependent upon third-party voice assistants like Google, Alexa, & Siri?

Be interesting to see how this unfolds and if it becomes a reality or not. 

1 reply

melvimbe

If Sonos does have this sort of broad plans, I seriously doubt that will be seeing it this Fall. These things take years to develop, and I doubt Sonos would be hiring people with experience in the streaming video space, or to manage partnerships in the area, only now if they had been working on the project for quite some time.

Sonos bought snips a couple years back, and a working prototype with a Sonos Connect existed at that time, it seems very reasonable that Sonos will be ready to release voice control features before the end of the year.  But I think it ends there for 2022 development.

Some other points to consider….Sonos is not involved with the Matter movement, so I can’t imagine anything happening with Matter would have that sort of direct impact on Sonos plans.  For one thing, I’ve heard nothing about a speaker control standard as a part of Matter.  Seems to be something that’s perhaps slipped on the radar, but it’s hard to imagine that the big players (Amazon, Apple, Google) really want a speaker standard, since they want you using their voice assistant to listen to music on their speakers for the most part.  Sonos probably isn't that interested in a standard either, as their speakers have features not available on other audio systems.  More than likely, if a standard existed, it would not contain Sonos exclusive features, just the features the big players have.

Other point is that I don’t think Sonos really wants to get too involved with smart home control.  It doesn’t seem like a very profitable business to be in.  Sonos can just allow everyone to use Alexa for home control, or Google if they allow it, along with snips.  Or, they can partner with smartthings or other existing home control/automation platforms to be a voice control front end.  It’s not like Sonos speakers have the space to handle home automation, and going cloud based would be expensive and defeat the cloudless ability of snips.

Thirdly, the news about Sonos hiring for home theatre specialists is assuming Sonos wants to make their own streaming box.  While possible, it could easily just mean that Sonos wants to build control apps for smart TVs and streaming boxes.  Or, ‘OS’ could be referring to a new generation of wireless home theatre audio.  Either way, way to early to really know for sure.

Danny

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