Sonos Voice Control and NAS Server?

Sonos Voice Control does not currently support choosing music from a local music library or NAS.

What an odd and disappointing omission by Sonos. I’m curious why this functionality has not been included.

Sonos hasn’t provided an explanation.  Worth noting that  SVC does not work with all music services either. I would have expect it to work for any music source.  I’m more inclined to believe that this isn’t an omission, but there is some technical reason for it. Hard to really grasp what that reason could be without better understanding of how the tech works.

My now-retired Alexa service for Sonos did support NAS content, as well as many music services. Sonos will likely expand their coverage over time, though as we all know the NAS user base is an ever-decreasing priority for them due to usage.

I don’t really understand why they don’t support Spotify right now, that was one of the easier ones for me to code up.

Did it not support just volume level changes but not getting music play to start from a NAS? That is my memory of what I had read about this in the early days.

I agree that NAS user base is shrinking; on the other hand getting SVC to locally replicate what the Sonos app does for NAS play should not be a big development project, I would speculate. 

Assisted by a service running on a local PC, yes? 

“Just a few lines of code” 😉

Which first ran through Alexa cloud servers to translate voice to text.  Not sure if that makes a difference, not without knowing more about SVC and how it works internally, but just can’t assume that what worked for that process works the same for a fully locally processed SVC to search and retrieve from NAS.

I have no idea, but I’m beginning to believe that SVC can process many key words, typical room names, and maybe Sonos radio stations 100% locally.  But when you specify the name  of an artist, song, album, etc….it can’t complete translate the sound to English words.  It would make sense that it then sends the textualized sounds to a search engine in the cloud, with whatever service you’ve signed up for, to complete the search.  That really wouldn’t change the fact that the information is locally processed and your voice isn’t recorded, it’s just not completed converted to normal english text when sent to a music service to retrieve the music you requested.

If that is the case, that would explain why only a few music services are currently supported.  The textualized sound  search capability needs to be supported by the music service.  And it would explain why local libraries are not supported, since there is no service there to support this type of search.  But I am just guessing at this.

Also, if I were Sonos, I might be looking to support Plex via SVC, as a means of accessing local libraries, instead of direct support.  Plex support would reduce the need for local library support.

If SVC works like it is theorised to above, NAS control is more than a “few lines of code” and may even never get done given commercial considerations.

Alexa/Echo do local NAS play very well with even the USD 5 a year subscription to My Media for Alexa server installed on a home computer that could even just be a dedicated Raspberry PI. The only hitch is that this needs the Echo device to be connected to the net. But this might be another candidate for SVC; the real sticky here is the low percentage of NAS users in the Sonos user base, that will probably not let it get prioritised. 

Spotify on the other hand should be high priority especially considering how well the native Spotify app works with Sonos today, so SVC would be a very useful adjunct to that feature. 

As an aside; does SVC understand other English accents, even if the response is just US accented English for now?

For NAS users something that you may know, but for those that do not, a copy/paste of a comment in another thread here:

some users asking for voice control of their local library, which mostly works in any case, once the tracks have been manually loaded to a ‘room’ queue.

I have NAS based Sonos playlists self curated by genre that have more than 2000 songs in most that I play in random shuffle mode. I could see leaving them in the queue for days at a stretch and have them accessible via SVC - if I had SVC! 

While a partial solution for sure, it is one that is simple to put in place if it works as claimed in the italics.

I think this is just referring to the fact that SVC (and Alexa and GA as well) commands like resume, pause, skip, etc...the general playback commands….work regardless if what audio is currently playing and the command makes sense for what’s playing.  What doesn’t work is the ability to search a streaming source and initiate playback for something that isn’t already in the queue ready to go.  That only works for the currently supported services.

So yes, if your only need to for local library playback is to just play what’s already in the queue, then you wouldn’t need further local library support.