Will Sonos work with google home?

Google home hasn't even been released yet and we just recently heard details on it. Expecting Sonos to be far enough along for any announcement on Google home is ridiculous.

I mean the original post said they needed to get on board with Google or Amazon blazing he trail. Then find ininfomed that they are in fact deeply involved with Amazon ... then that's not good enough.

I think they are fully focused on Alexa. But as you say the alexa work may help the possibility of Google. And Sonos has a history of working well with Google.

I would say alexa public betas first of the year with Google a long way off if ever. If they do decide to do Google I would think 3rd q next year would be earliest.

Yes, i'd seen that ... how long is soon though?



Well, if you read the announcement, it says "an invite-only beta test later this year, with general availability in 2017." How much more specific do you think they should get? (Hitn: You aren't going to get anything more specific).


That was posted 2 months ago and alexa and google home are both available and already allow you to voice control music. Some specifics are required before people start drifting off to them or as first time users wondering why they should go sonos at all, leaving less in sonos's coffers for future development.


The specifics are Alexa is announced as definitely coming to private beta this year and full release after that in 2017. Nothing else has been announced. So if you are making a decision for the earliest support of voice control on Sonos, your decision is pretty easy. It's either Echo/Alexa, or nothing.


I know it's early days for both, but no confirmation on it being worked on for google home and no specific dates for Alexa is not very heartening. I imagine if they're creating an SDK / API then if it's done for amazon, then it's easy enough to implement for google; but what are their incentive as their product does it by using their subscription models - lnking to sonos and music libraries means less income to them.

I think we just need our confidence levels risen in sonos.

You can be confident Sonos will bring voice control via Amazon Echo/Alexa early next year. As to the claims of linking to Sonos meaning less income, there is no financial relationship between Sonos and the subscription music service partners. The Sonos Music Partners API is free and open to any and all services. Sonos receives no income from the music service subscriptions, as stated by Ryan S from Sonos here:

This question comes up from time to time, and I'm not exactly sure why, but again I'll confirm that
Sonos doesn't get any kickbacks, percentages, or any sort of monetary incentives from our music service partners
when it comes to using or adding them to Sonos.

We're always happy to partner with new music services and explore making them available on Sonos. We have a free
API available to use for anyone, and a team dedicated to support them even, again, for free. Some features aren't
available or aren't exactly the same because they aren't part of our API, but we're constantly trying to improve
that as well.

Also, music services determine what account types they will make available on Sonos. This is usually based on a
lot of factors that they consider.

sorry, i meant the other way around. what incentive do amazon/google really have to develop alexa/home to work with sonos. sonos is now basically a competitor to them for providing multi-room music. in many cases, using sonos takes away from amazon/google revenue because many of us sonos users use extensive music libraries rather than using amazon/google paid streaming music services which currently (ignoring some of the kludges you can do) is hand in hand with amazon/google speakers.

interesting times...

Well first of all, Echo/Alexa is not multi-room audio. The devices have no multi-room capabilities at this time. Second, 92 percent of all music listening on Sonos is streaming radio or paid on-demand as stated in this blog entry:

http://blog.sonos.com/news/to-a-billion

I'm pretty confident in saying the streaming services would rather have the 92% of music on Sonos that is streamed vs. worrying about the 8% from the local library.

Plus, what Chris says above^^.

We are talking about Google Home integration here. This is old news.

Maybe the word "play" is forbidden 🙂
Try with a synonym!

Thanks for that iismewalk. Wanted to update my old sonos systems with sleeker play 5 and playbar with sub and was hoping to get a Google home to run things. I need to mesh portable speakers for music with better tv sound for movies . Sounds like you have a nice work around for now.

Looking at the back of the playbar you need an optical output on your TV to get the sound to your playbar. The connect, connect amp, and the play5 all have input Jacks that show up on your app. From here you can play throughout the house by grouping them together.

How did you get this to work? I got SmartThings hub today - set it up - but can't get Google Home to play music via my Sonos in any rooms. Would be grateful for any advice/tips you have on this one.

My guess is they will want to work with home but that integration with home will have to come later.... we don't know a lot yet about how developers are going to be able to work with home.

I would assume a lot of what they learn with echo integration will work the same with home integration so future home integration won't be a long way behind echo. I would say if we expect echo by first quarter next year maybe home by 3rd quarter. I guess depends on size of their team if they have ability to work on both simultaneously. Then what about Apple HomeKit. I would think if your doing the voice thing you would want to work with alexa, Google, and Siri.

I debated canceling my order for addition dots because home seems to be more fluid in its ability to recognize speech. But decided alexa was already doing all I need from it, will be first with Sonos support, and the dots are cheaper then the others (as with Sonos I don't need the speaker part).

With my smartthings I can already play and pause my Sonos speakers so I'm sure home will do that out the gate with my Smartthings hub in middle. with home I would have been able control my play:5 in kitchen that has chrimecast dongle I would assume

Hello Adam, which sonos do you have? Do you have a harmony hub as well?

Not sure this will ever happen.
Sonos would just become another casting speaker like sony, LG, etc, loose their ecosystem status, .

I get your reasoning but i'm not sure that's the case. My SONOS already support Google Play music. All I want is to be able to control my Google Play music by voice. As I type this I seem to recall an article somewhere that said that SONOS might be adding voice support to their devices. My memory is foggy on that fact though. If it is the case then I think Paulw123's logic would make sense.

As a general note ecosystem lock-in never sits well with me. If SONOS goes that route and removes my choice I might have to reconsider my options. I'm seriously bummed that my Insteon won't connect with my SONOS because I'm on Android. As it turns out I'm blaming Insteon for that issue and now SONOS as the SONOS platform is open to 3rd party control it's just that my choosen 3rd party doesn't support it.

We are early days in home automation and early adopters are going to get burned along the way. Maybe I should just accept that.