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:
- 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.
- 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.
