SONOS ALEXA Integration?

I do see one major benefit of Sonos over homepod. There are no walled gardens. You can build a playlist from any number of sources. Mixing amazon, NAS, Spotify. Even the Micro SD card in my Blackberry.

Maybe you have identified the niche use case where Homepod really would be a better choice. On the other hand an ipod loving apartment dweller can use Bluetooth with an Echo Look or Echo Dot connected to some nice powered speakers and save some money by ignoring the Homepod vs Sonos battle completely. It will be interesting to see what ends up appealing to this group.
Yes, it will be interesting though I can't help thinking that in addition to the above, if the Alexa integration is done well, that will be one more effective barrier to adoption of Homepods.

How can i get on the Beta tester for Sonos and Alexa?
I have two Sonos Connect:AMPS will be adding 4 more shortly, i also just got my hands on a Amazon Dot. would really love to test this out...🆒

I think Sonos might have been too ambitious on this idea. They seem to want to be everything to everyone which will usually leave everyone disappointed.

All I want is to say "Alexa, play my 80's rock station on my living room Sonos" and hear her say "ok". If they could have rolled out a few simple skills while they were working on their plan for world domination, they could have avoided a lot of the bad blood.

For those concerned about not being heard over the music, just say "ALEXA, STOP" in a loud voice. She will usually respond to that and stop the music. Then you can give your next request. Just don't scream it too loud or your neighbors might think someone named Alexa is trying to kill you.

The only bad blood I see is from a couple indignant posters. Most are waiting patiently for what was promised to be delivered 6 months from now, as should be expected.

Steve_199, I'm no expert, but I think I understand the framework of how Alexa works pretty well. What you think of is pretty easy...really isn't all that easy.

Your typical Alexa skill works as such.
1 - local Echo dot hears a command.
2 - local Echo dot sends command to Alexa servers that converts voice to text, then determines what to do with it.
3 - if the command is for a 3rd party skill, it sends the skill to the 3rd party server for processing
4 - 3rd party server processes and performs action and gives Alexa servers a response.
5 - Alexa 3rd party servers give a response to your local Echo.

So it's somewhat complicated, but beyond that...Sonos doesn't have a server out there to act as a 3rd party server in this scenario. It would have to set that up in order for a basic 'Alexa tell sonos to play xxx'. On top of that, your sonos system doesn't have a presence outside of your local network. There has never been any sort of registration process of such where the Sonos server (that doesn't yet exist) could no one zones you have in order to command it do something.

That said, there are some work arounds. Your local echo isn't completely dumb in that it can do some actions on it's own. That's why there are some bulbs that work with Echo without need for a smarthub...or work with a smarthum. Most of the time there is a smarthub. So if you have smartthings for example, your Echo knows to send a particular command to your local hub for processing. FYI, there are some hubs that can control sonos, and are setup with Alexa. Therefore you can control Sonos from an Echo by way of a hub...but the functionality is limited.

And I think your statement about simply saying "Alexa, stop" brings up another point. With all of the above mentioned, that command won't work...because you didn't tell it what to stop. You would have to say "Alexa, tell Sonos to stop". And Sonos management has seemed to acknowledged that that is far from ideal. Annoying perhaps. Hence, they want to spend the time to get tighter integration so that when you say stop, Alexa knows it's playing music on Sonos and that must be what you want to stop. Or perhaps when you ask to start music, it knows you mean in the sonos zone you're currently in, and not on the echo's speakers.

And sure, they could have gone with being able to drop the whole 'tell Sonos' at a later date, but the development work for going all the way can't be built off of going halfway. So why not just go all the way.

Again, not an expert, but that's what it seems like to me.

The analysis by melvimbe is pretty good.

Some code is needed on the local network, and the Smart Devices method used for a few lights will not work for Sonos. Code is needed in the Sonos players themselves, I assume this will be using a similar method to the Spotify-direct stuff. (This is also why my Skill requires a Windows 10 PC).

The "Alexa, stop" would not require "tell Sonos" if Sonos uses the audio-API set, and Sonos was the most-recently used audio skill. However, the current audio-API set has a poor extension model, so cannot add "in the xxx-room" to commands. It appears that the Sonos/Alexa features as described publically require a bunch of new features in the Alexa infrastructure itself, and Amazon are very slow at rolling out such updates.

Also Amazon are very US-only in their Alexa support, which is another problem for Sonos who are much more international-thinking in their products.

I just installed MySpeaker and its skills to control my Sonos System via Alexa. So far it works pretty good. One bad is that its application must be running on a PC or Laptop connected to the same network as Sonos.

The only bad blood I see is from a couple indignant posters. Most are waiting patiently for what was promised to be delivered 6 months from now, as should be expected.

"Indignant posters" aka frustrated Sonos customers. Frustrated customers voicing their concerns are not the problem, that's called "feedback". It's when we stop caring that it becomes an issue.

Look, I know we'll get it when we get it and customers should just shut up about it, but six more months will make it almost 3 years since it was suggested as a feature. I'm reminding Sonos that I've wanted this feature for years and I still want it. They say they've been working on it for years. The next question becomes, ok, so where is it? Maybe requesting an update is out of line, but I don't think so.

Customers that don't care don't bother posting they just move on and buy something else.