Best answer by Ryan S
View original
SONOS ALEXA Integration?
Userlevel 3
Been waiting to hear news about when this will happen and am starting to think it never will. I have Sonos and Alexa in every room. I did this with the assurance that Sonos and Alexa are going to work together. There has been next to no news regarding integration for the past 6 months.... When can we expect to hear about Sonos and Alexa integration? Is it still happening? Please any update would be appreciated.
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.
Page 9 / 11
This is good information, I think, regarding what functionality will be available. I was hoping that you could tie a specific echo to a specific zone. In that way, you wouldn't have to name the zone you want to play music in. If this article can be trusted, it does look like that will be implemented. You will have to add 'in the kitchen' to your command.
While a little disappointed about that, it is also implies that you will be able to use your echo without disturbing the music playing in the same room/zone. I don't want to pause the music when I ask about the weather, and I certainly didn't want sonos to forget what was currently playing. This implementation sounds like you won't be able to have your sonos speakers respond as the voice of Alexa. Perfectly fine with me.
What isn't clear is, will the music source be from what you have setup in Alexa or from your sources in the Sonos configuration? Hopefully the later. If you ask Alexa to play music without specifying a zone, will it just play on it's own speakers or ask you for a zone. If you want multiple zones, can you list them out? Can't wait to find out.
as a new sonos owner , as others, we love the sound quality, just hoping the alexa integration come, everytime friends come to visit our home, and ask how does sonos integrates on echo dot, he..... he..he..... all I can say ... it's work in progress, but most of the time, I got feedback from friends, it will be awesome to have voice integrated on SONOS, as SONOS has great sounds........
The music shouldn't pause but it would be nice if the volume dropped a little while Alexa is speaking so you can hear her.
I wonder if you are supposed to give the Echo and Sonos speaker in each room the same name or if they need to be unique? If I am at my desk I assume I can say call the Kitchen and that will activate the Kitchen Echo but if I say play some music in the Kitchen that this will cause the Kitchen Sonos speaker to play. Or maybe Amazon plans to let you tell one Echo to play music on another Echo at some point which would mean unique names all around; "Kitchen Echo" and "Kitchen Sonos"?
Therefore the fact is everyone is asking for it. The excuse we dont knows etc etc is just rubbish. When developing anything you have a clear roadmap of when its likely to be completed. This is a poor attitude from Sonos and like others tired of waiting for it or some news.
But my saviour has come Amazon Prime Day half price big echos so ill just get one of those and sell the Sonos. I dont need wireless to play music. I dont need bridges to play music etc etc Not having bluetooth in all Sonos is stupid. Its a pretty useless expensive speaker if you dont have wireless! Time to get rid tbh. Tired of hearing excuses or actually not hearing anything its arrogant for Sonos to think its OK.
Echo is good, but not comparable to Sonos in sound quality. Bluetooth to headphones is a plus.. Also, you are tied to Amazon Music or Spotify - no access to your own music library. Voice control is useful but not the Holy Grail some people expect it to be.
This person does actually...ive had my sonos for quite a few years thank you. Things have changed and Sonos hasnt. Whether the quality is better or not the fact is it should have built in bluetooth as standard. The only reason it doesnt is purely to tie you in to buy more Sonos products and speakers. If my internet went down i have basically a useless speaker. If had bought 5 sonos play 1 for example for each room they would be rendered useless if i didnt have wireless or internet fact. Not only that i need to buy a bridge just for one speaker!! Every other brand have Bluetooth to just play music ad actually the quality is pretty good unless youre a complete sound nerd. Have you actually heard the Big Amazon Echo? Its very good and I dont have to worry one bit about Sonos integration and actually the Sonos speaker arent actually that great they are quite bassy. Everyone is integrating with Alexa EVERYONE. But as I said we can move to other products. There is a legitimate reason people are bashing Sonos. They are now out of date people want instant On, not have to have lots of things just to play music.
Its not been out long. It will integrate with everything. Remember when the Sonos app first came out? It was a nightmare just setting up Sonos never mind trying to link to Spotify. Sonos app doesnt support other music streams yet either. Again without an internet connection sonos is rendered completely useless.
Its not been out long. It will integrate with everything. Remember when the Sonos app first came out? It was a nightmare just setting up Sonos never mind trying to link to Spotify. Sonos app doesnt support other music streams yet either. Again without an internet connection sonos is rendered completely useless.
1) Alexa doesn't work without an internet connection
2) The significant majority of music listened to via Sonos is streamed - That doesn't work without internet.
3) Internet radio streams don't work without internet.
You know alexa works with bluetooth right?
I.think you need to check things before posting
Its not been out long. It will integrate with everything. Remember when the Sonos app first came out? It was a nightmare just setting up Sonos never mind trying to link to Spotify. Sonos app doesnt support other music streams yet either. Again without an internet connection sonos is rendered completely useless.
1) Alexa doesn't work without an internet connection
2) The significant majority of music listened to via Sonos is streamed - That doesn't work without internet.
3) Internet radio streams don't work without internet.
You know alexa works with bluetooth right?
I.think you need to check things before posting
No, Alexa needs an internet connection for voice control. Perhaps you meant Echo, which can be used as a crappy Bluetooth speaker, but what's the point?
Userlevel 7
+17
Sonos got caught napping. Things moved on. Everyone and their mum offers a wifi speaker now. Sonos wanted to keep it a closed ecosystem to guarantee future sales, but the market has exploded and Sonos have changed track and are now trying to integrate whilst not becoming another casting speaker where they are overpriced.
A fine line to tread, I wish them well, but feel they may have left it too late.......blackberry phone anyone ;O))
A fine line to tread, I wish them well, but feel they may have left it too late.......blackberry phone anyone ;O))
Userlevel 7
+17
I don't even want voice.
I want bbc iplayer radio, which voice might one day bring to sonos through google home. I can't see any other way it will ever happen. Again this might not add many sales to sonos, but might keep current UK customers from selling up.
I want bbc iplayer radio, which voice might one day bring to sonos through google home. I can't see any other way it will ever happen. Again this might not add many sales to sonos, but might keep current UK customers from selling up.
So why are you posting about it in the "SONOS ALEXA Integration?" Not only are you a broken record, you are an off-topic one.
Posting that you don't want a feature in that feature discussion forum is on topic. Talk about broken freaking record.
I can't wait for integration either. We just picked up an Alexa and we have a sonos, but the Alexa is already playing more music in my house just because it's so much easier for my wife to just ask it to play something. It drives me nuts because teh Sonos Play 5 is sitting right next to it, quiet, but she just wants the song to play.
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/control-sonos-speakers-with-alexa,news-24892.html
There is also an FAQ from Sonos which I find easier to understand :
https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4158/kw/alexa
You know alexa works with bluetooth right?
I.think you need to check things before posting
Alexa doesn't work at all without an internet connection. Sonos does, at least for local libraries. The fact Alexa/Echo uses Bluetooth does not mean it does not use the internet. It requires an IP (aka "an internet connection"). It has to connect to WiFi (aka "an internet connection") and finally, all voice control functions are processed in the cloud (aka "an internet connection").
It really seems you are the one who should check things before posting.
Actually.... neither *needs* the "internet". All they need is wireless signal (aka WiFi; or 802.11 wireless lan). I was in a situation recently where I was without "internet" but then I just made a local area network with some ethernet cables I had lying around, plugged them into my wireless router and walla, Sonos music was blasting through my house, though I had no internet access. I did the same thing to get my Phillips Hue bulbs up and running.
Many of Alexa's services rely much more on actual internet cloud services like being able to search wikipedia or check your google calendar; but I bet it could still talk to you, set timers, and control devices on your local area network, without "internet".
Apologies for the redirect! WiFi are often thought of at the same thing; I like to correct that misunderstanding where I can. All things aside, I am very excited for the day I can lazily shout at my echo Dots to play whatever artist, genre, playlist, etc. As long as it happens eventually, I can wait.
Sigh.
TravelingWriter,
May I ask you to do a test with your Echo/Alexa device? Unplug the external (internet) connection from it, leaving it as just a provider for your local wifi, with no external connection. Then try doing anything with the Amazon device. I'm relatively certain that anything will fail, except for maybe connecting to it with Bluetooth. There's no "smarts" inside that device, just a trigger to recognize it's own name, and then call out to the cloud for processing the command given after the name.
Please let me know what your test reveals, I'd be interested if my assumptions were incorrect..
May I ask you to do a test with your Echo/Alexa device? Unplug the external (internet) connection from it, leaving it as just a provider for your local wifi, with no external connection. Then try doing anything with the Amazon device. I'm relatively certain that anything will fail, except for maybe connecting to it with Bluetooth. There's no "smarts" inside that device, just a trigger to recognize it's own name, and then call out to the cloud for processing the command given after the name.
Please let me know what your test reveals, I'd be interested if my assumptions were incorrect..
Yes, I know. Was hoping to lead a horse to water 🙂
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/control-sonos-speakers-with-alexa,news-24892.html
There is also an FAQ from Sonos which I find easier to understand :
https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4158/kw/alexa
Thanks, we just got the alexa a few days ago and while missing some bass it sounds better than I expected it to.
I'll try the Dot suggestion with my play:5. I didn't realize there was an auto setting to pickup line-in activity.
The auto-play line in feature is both a curse and a major benefit to me. I've got my Mac hooked in to my Play:5 so that I can listen to TuneIn premium baseball games. But when I'm just messing around with my computer and listening to music, the autoplay videos on all these silly websites will interrupt my music enjoyment. I can think of two ways for me to fix this, but I'm lazy. It certainly isn't Sonos' fault, it's entirely on me. 🙂
I've just replaced a Bluetooth receiver connected to my old Play 5 with an Echo Dot. Because of my location, conventional broadband at just 200k won't support most music streamed over Sonos so I have to use 10Gbit satellite broadband. My 20Gig monthly allowance is mainly used for this; but the beauty of Sonos is that I can use the mesh network to distribute wireless internet throughout the 15 or so zones (old, old setup with several CR100s still hanging on).
The irony here is that the Echo can't recognise the Sonos mesh and so I have to use a mobile hotspot device for Alexa to work. I just hope the integration Sonos has in mind will allow it to connect directly to their own mesh network which is fundamental to my internet access (albeit it's probably an unusual setup).
And without internet, my NAS works fine when the satellite or mobile signals don't allow streaming, but I'm considering adding a Brennan B2 if anyone's got any experience they can point me to...
The irony here is that the Echo can't recognise the Sonos mesh and so I have to use a mobile hotspot device for Alexa to work. I just hope the integration Sonos has in mind will allow it to connect directly to their own mesh network which is fundamental to my internet access (albeit it's probably an unusual setup).
And without internet, my NAS works fine when the satellite or mobile signals don't allow streaming, but I'm considering adding a Brennan B2 if anyone's got any experience they can point me to...
The irony here is that the Echo can't recognise the Sonos mesh and so I have to use a mobile hotspot device for Alexa to work. I just hope the integration Sonos has in mind will allow it to connect directly to their own mesh network which is fundamental to my internet access (albeit it's probably an unusual setup).
You could probably just plug a Wifi A/P or an old router to the ETH port of your play 5 to extend the (non-mesh) wifi network from your satellite broadband directly to your Echo.
All. Keep in mind that if you happen to be using a Logitech Harmony control system which Alexa fully integrates with, it does provide fairly decent control of your Sonos system from Alexa. This is not an integrated solution as you still have to plug your echo into the line input of a device to get it in the system if you want to actually hear the Alexa response in your Sonos system. The line input is not necessary if you just want to control Sonos through Alexa. I most often use this to control volume. It's a little bit of a long path as you state "Alexa tell Harmony to turn up the volume". But it does work well.
Regarding bluetooth, I don't think it's that uncommon for products to leave out certain technologies if using that technology doesn't show the product at it's best. Sonos can't demonstrate it's sound quality over bluetooth, and I can understand why they don't want customers concluding that Sonos doesn't have better sound because they are using bluetooth. Many customers won't know that bluetooth is the limiting factor, not the quality of the speakers.
A good example of this, I think, was Apple's decision several years ago, not to include Adobe Flash in their browser, even though it was commonly used at the time. They felt that the tech wasn't good, and wanted to push for HTML 5 instead.
I'd say a company has to decide between giving customers what they want, giving them what they actually need, and pushing customers to using the product at it's best experience.
I do think Sonos would opt to include bluetooth if they ever came up with a product designed to be used away from your home network, where streaming music directly isn't an easy option. That's a bit of a departure for Sonos though, so I wouldn't expect that anytime soon.
A good example of this, I think, was Apple's decision several years ago, not to include Adobe Flash in their browser, even though it was commonly used at the time. They felt that the tech wasn't good, and wanted to push for HTML 5 instead.
I'd say a company has to decide between giving customers what they want, giving them what they actually need, and pushing customers to using the product at it's best experience.
I do think Sonos would opt to include bluetooth if they ever came up with a product designed to be used away from your home network, where streaming music directly isn't an easy option. That's a bit of a departure for Sonos though, so I wouldn't expect that anytime soon.
Ummm...just integrate SONOS and ALEXA please. NOW!
Page 9 / 11
Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.