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Just got Sonos Voice Control on my Beam Gen 2.(I have 5 other speakers around my home) I purposely avoided all the other voice Sonos speakers because I didn’t like the idea of Amazon or Google listening in on me, not to mention their annoying voices.  But Sonos knocked it outta the park with their new Sonos Voice Control. 

The professional actor chosen is perfect.  It is quick as can be and best of all never interrupts the mood or feel of the music.  His voice truly has the class and charm of Sonos.  I like how it listens a bit longer so when you say “Hey Sonos turn it down” you can wait and see if you like the volume, if not, follow up with “More” and the volume will go down more.  This is a nice touch without any chime or voice interrupting the music. You can follow when Sonos Voice Control is listening if you look at the brightness level on the light near the mic. 

Now I have a massive music library that lives on Dropbox and is meticulously organized in Apple Music(iTunes).  I play my music via Apple Airplay and Sonos Voice Control works flawlessly, even correctly naming the song and artist when I ask, “Hey Sonos, what’s playing?”.  Everything works great.  It reads the artists and songs as I labeled them.  Works with skip, pause, etc. 

Now for the two very small feature requests: 

  1. It would be great if a Sonos Voice Control button was added to the Sonos App, to essentially turn any Sonos speaker into voice controlled with a phone.  This could also introduce those who have no Voice Sonos speakers to the new voice controls.  Perhaps if you have a Sonos Five, which doesn’t have a mic, you could control it via your phone.  I for one am already thinking of upgrading some of my Sonos SL speakers to ones with Voice Control, but a button to “enable” the Voice Control on the phone would be nice. 
  2. Is there anyway to get Voice control to work with Apple Airplay as a default?  I know I could use Apple Music and convert my entire 50,000 song library, but some of it may not be on Apple music or Apple Music could destroy my library.  And the downside to using a Airplay or Dropbox is there is no way to say “Hey Sonos, play artist or song from my library]”.  It simply can’t.  Right now I am using Pandora as the default service which does work when I ask to play specific artists or songs, but not songs that only exist on my library.  I have versions of songs that do not exist on any service. Maybe it’s just making Sonos play probably with Dropbox, but this has been a discussion on here many times. 

That’s it.  Great job on the Sonos Voice Control.  I may be getting more Sonos speakers with mics and Sonos Voice Control.

 

 

On the second point, this could not feasibly work. The Airplay source is remote from SVC, and Sonos simply receives the audio stream. 

That makes sense. 

I suppose then we just need some sort of Dropbox or cloud player support, which of course is an ongoing discussion on these boards.

 

 

 

UPDATE***

 

So I did found a slight flaw or request.  Whenever you start playing music on one speaker via voice control you CANNOT transfer control to another speaker.  Which means, If I tell Voice Control to “play Blues on all speakers” and then after a short time, go to bed and say “Move to bedroom” it will indeed shut off the other speakers and move to bedroom.  But I cannot skip or use voice control in other rooms to find what song it is or change stations.  Even worse is I cannot swipe from the new speaker either.  I can only stop while touching it.

The irony is if I play from Airplay I can do anything from all speakers, which is great!  So it seems there needs to be a way to transfer control to a new main speaker, even if you started from a different speaker.  

 

I suppose the work around is to turn off all speakers, and start anew, but if you have no voice control in another room you cannot transfer a “feed” to a new room and keep playing and swiping. 

 

Just an FYI

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