Sonos One vs. Echo Dot?
I am seriously considering the purchase of a Sonos One for my daughter but have some serious concerns. I have been reading (here) about customer concerns over the mic sensitivity in the Sonos One - many, many complaints. The responses I have read is to expect software updates from Sonos to correct this in the future. The Dot is tried & true and my personal experience with it so far and its integration with my Play 3 is great. I have not read a great deal of positive responses from Sonos saying these fixes will come soon. Would love to go with the Sonos One but not certain this is the right decision. Can someone help me? Any & all responses will be appreciated......Steve
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I am sure that others will respond in depth to your questions, but might I trouble you for some insight into the above - is this the Sonos integration from early October you are referring to or does it predate that? If the latter, how did you achieve it?
I received my dot about 2 weeks ago, so I would say yes - probably early October. I am currently running Sonos 8.1.1 and Alexa is working very well with my Play 3. It does not drop songs, etc. I only have one Sonos Play 3 but am planning to add others to my system in different locations throughout my home. What else would you like to know? Please be specific and I will do my best to answer you. Thanks.....Steve
You have answered it all Steve, thanks. I was just curious if you were using the Dot with the 3 in some way before October 4 - I see you were not, so there isn't an answer to be given.
From all I have read here, Sonos One seems to be a good idea if users are willing to live with a speaker of excellent sound quality and performance when used without Alexa/Voice control, for some time before the bugs in the voice control side are eliminated. Long term, I don't see why it won't be a better solution than a Dot + Play 1.
From all I have read here, Sonos One seems to be a good idea if users are willing to live with a speaker of excellent sound quality and performance when used without Alexa/Voice control, for some time before the bugs in the voice control side are eliminated. Long term, I don't see why it won't be a better solution than a Dot + Play 1.
Kumar - thanks for the response. Just wondering why Sonos released a product (Sonos One) before some serious bugs were worked out? Also, seems like they would officially address when they might fix the voice control shortcomings. If it is just tweaking the software, why can't they fix promptly to address much customer dissatisfaction? I'm not knowledgeable as to how hard or difficult tweaking software is. As I mentioned I want to give one to my daughter for Chistmas but want her to have
an enjoyable experience as I have had with my Sonos product. She is not quite as tech savvy as I might be.
an enjoyable experience as I have had with my Sonos product. She is not quite as tech savvy as I might be.
"Fixing" requires what they call a software development cycle, which includes diagnosis, design, coding, unit testing, QA testing, rollout (whether alpha, beta, or public beta) and release. Now with agile development and cloud based solutions like Alexa skills these can be sped up or placed into a sprint for faster turnaround, but you cannot actually skip a cycle, and cycles are planned ahead of time. More than likely the features and fixes coming in any imminent release were set in stone months ago, and unless something is a dire emergency, those releases will not be held up in order to insert a recently requested feature or uncovered bug. Nor will features considered a high priority be preempted by those that are lower on the list.
Here at MegaCorp, we're the biggest customer of a well-know cloud-based CRM. Was on a call this morning at 6AM (sigh) with our dev teams in India, Dominican Republic, and multiple US cities. Releases are usually done monthly; it's lots of fun, with developers around the world scrambling to get their updates to the shared SVN repository, pushed via Jenkins to UAT, fully tested with a minimum of 90% code coverage, multiple errors because someone invariably forgot to include something. Then, the whole thing repeats for the production release. This stuff simply can't be rushed.
Here at GovernmentBureaucracyCorp, I gotta go in tonight at 2 AM for a fix on our OLTP system caused by the rushed testing of a release to QA back in August. Of course with priorities, scheduling, vacation hours, and other factors; the August release didn't get in the QA queue till mid-October and was running into another release with a hard deadline. Hence why "fixes" are being issued now, and trust me, these fall under the "dire emergency" category. 😃
OK - sounds complicated. Didn't realize there was so much to it. With all that said, wouldn't you think that Sonos would have Beta tested and realized they had voice recognition problems long before they released the new product? Does not seem fair to consumers to push a product "out the door" before it is actually ready. Wasn't this a joint venture with Amazon using their proprietary voice recognition technology and software? Hard to believe this couldn't have been solved earlier in the pipeline? Just based on my reading here and elsewhere, it seems that Amazon is way ahead of Sonos on their VR technology. Does anyone have an idea approximately when they will have this fixed (weeks, months, a year)? Trying to get an answer to my original question.
Um, Sonos is using Amazon's VR technology, Alexa. Amazon had the necessary APIs under development for a year. Sonos was doing plenty of beta testing the entire time, in conjunction with Amazon and several other speaker manufacturers. Plenty of customers and press were practically screaming, "why is this taking so long?!"
Amazon does VR very well, Sonos does multi-room music very well. Marrying the two is not easy, and both companies have their goals and requirements. Those goals and requirements are not necessarily mutual, and most likely are even diametrically opposed. In many ways these are competing companies, and to paraphrase a statement I make to my boss many times, it ain't easy to get Pepsi and Coke together to make you a bottle of Poke.
OK - am I missing something? Why then is the VR on the Sonos One not working as well as that on the Dot? Why are customers having to yell or speak very loudly to it as opposed to the Dot. I thought the advertised 6 microphones were going to take care of that? What went wrong?
Now that actually makes some sense to me. It would certainly account for the present problem. We assume that if two companies team up together on a product that might benefit both, that they both would be on the same page and have the same goals.....um maybe not?
That has been addressed here by a Sonos rep. There's learning that needs to be done over time to fine tune the VR. Amazon apparently hasn't shared that learning with Sonos, whose system will need to catch up. Might take weeks, maybe months.
Echo is a mature product on a mature hardware platform. The microphone array on the One is brand new and hasn't undergone the same maturity cycle that the array on the Echo has. Sonos has stated that the sensitivity and recognition abilities are all software based, and will learn as it goes along. Even in the week or so it has been out, the larger user base and the feedback that entails already has it seeing some improvements. It was mentioned today that Alexa on the One seems to be hearing better and distinguishing commands more accurately.
Dynamic AI is a pretty new thing, and seems to be working, albeit slowly. Of course that could mean Terminators in our midst in a decade, but hey, how bad is an apocalyptic rise of the machines if we can get a few years of voice controlled music? 😉
The joys of being an early adopter!
I've been using the 1st generation echo for almost 2 years and it's flawless in picking up commands but the sounds quality was lacking and it didn't have an aux out. I was excited about the Sonos One but the mic sensitivity is seriously lacking and annoying. I would have to yell a few times for it to "wake up" I've used it for 2 weeks and am looking into using an echo dot with play3.
Erm...maybe not is just as possible I can say, having tried hard to stitch a joint effort between a US company and a Japanese one in the machine tool business. By the end, it all happens - usually, but not as slickly as you would think; it is still a people driven process.
That said, I suspect that the resolution of this specific issue is more a Sonos side thing, so the best that this implies for the time line for the fix is sooner rather than later.
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