Sonos Is About To Introduce Its Own Voice Assistant

Sonos is preparing to introduce its own voice assistant service within the next few weeks, according to people familiar with the company's plans. The voice functionality will let customers play and control music on Sonos' whole-home audio platform. The Verge reports: It will be part of a forthcoming software update set to arrive first to customers in the US on June 1st, with an international rollout to follow. Sonos Voice will serve as an alternative to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, which Sonos already supports on its smart speakers and voice-enabled soundbars. All Sonos products that run the company's S2 software will support Sonos Voice Control.

Sonos has recently posted job openings related to the "Sonos Voice Experience," with the company saying its ambition is to "make voice interactions fully private, more personal, and more natural." The debut of Sonos Voice will mark a pivotal moment in Sonos' expansion into services as the company seeks to augment its hardware business. (Sonos Radio and the paid, higher quality Sonos Radio HD were the first such forays into services.) The offering will provide core conveniences that are similar to existing competitors, allowing Sonos product owners to play specific songs, artists, or playlists with voice commands, among other functions.

At launch, Sonos Voice will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and the company's own Sonos Radio. Spotify and Google's YouTube Music aren't yet on board. In keeping with Sonos' interest in privacy, the feature will not record user audio commands or relay them to the cloud for processing. "Hey Sonos" will be the wake word for Sonos Voice Control, and the company's internal tests show it to be quicker than competing assistant services at core music tasks. [...] The Sonos Voice Experience will stick to the fundamentals at launch. But if people are able to use Alexa at the same time -- Sonos calls this feature "voice concurrency" -- they'll be able to give the Sonos offering a shot without sacrificing smart home integrations or other more varied features that the Sonos voice service may lack.

"More private", right...

[devslash0]

Looks like it's going to be yet another manufacturer which will never make it into my house.

Re: "More private", right...

[wgoodman]

They bought Snips, which was a nice open source, local voice assistant. They could leave it local but I'm sure they didn't.

Re:

[mrwireless]

Some parts of it were open, but most of it wasn't. They did say they wanted to make it so at some point.
https://github.com/snipsco [github.com]

Since Sonos works closely with IKEA, which offers one of the most locally operating smart home systems, I'm a bit more optimistic that this will work as advertised. IKEA seems to be doing everything they can to avoid the torrent of bad IOT press attaching itself to their brand, and staying cloudless is a great way to do that.

IKEA should buy Sonos and create their own privacy focu

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Will it be any good though? The only one I've ever seem work semi-reliably is Google's, which honestly feels like magic. Alexa, Cortana, Siri and every other one I've come across had a pretty low hit rate.

Fuck Sonos

[slaker]

Somebody gave me a Sonos speaker a while back as a misguided Xmas gift.
I do not get it.

It only accepts streaming music services, but not all of them, and in fact none of the first three services that I actually use, the biggest being the Naxos Streaming Library, which I believe to be the largest service devoted entirely to classical music. It didn't support either of the other services I use either. After looking through their supported services, the only thing I found that *I* could use was whatever happen

Re:

[tchdab1]

But it tops out at 64,000 tracks of personal database. It can't index more. There are no known plans to do so. I mean, WTF.

Re:

[agm]

I have a single Sonos speaker and it works ok in that the sound quality is good enough for me. I only use Deezer which suits my needs. My gripe is that the iOS app connectivity to the speaker is terrible. From an Android tablet it's fine. I'm fed up with the wifi dropping and songs just stopping or skipping to the next song. No other device in that part of the house has connectivity issues. They're also very expensive for what they are. $369 for the small "Sonos One"? No thanks.

Re:

[Gilgaron]

I had the same experience, your gift givers must also shop at Costco. Couldn't even use it until I got home since it needed a WiFi connection before you could even bluetooth to it the first time! If you have a Synology NAS, you can get the AudioStation stuff streaming to it, and you can also use it via Bluetooth. But I agree that the device is a confusing boondoggle. It supports Alexa and Google Assistant, but if you enable them the included charger cannot charge the battery as fast as they'll drain it.

Re:

[teg]

If you have a Synology NAS, you can also share a volume with musical tracks on it, or run a Plex Server with access to those tracks. The Sonos can access both of those.

This is actually good news for privacy

[mrwireless]

Their voice assistant is based on the work of Snips, a French company they bought a few years ago, so we knew this was coming. https://snips.ai/ [snips.ai]

I have built my own open source privacy friendly voice assistant (Voco) around the 2019 version of their software. I even had a drink with one of their engineers back then.
https://github.com/createcandl... [github.com]

The first great thing about it is that it works 100% locally - no cloud needed. Obviously the streaming would require connections to the internet, but if they stay

Re:

[coofercat]

Working locally on a speaker is indeed a good thing - but we've seen from Apple that actually making this work is harder than it looks. In fairness, Sonos can limit the scope to only the activities that the UI supports, so their problem space is smaller - but I'll bet it still won't be as good with accents or having a cold or whatever. Hell, getting Alexa to turn the volume down a bit can be hard enough, even with cloud references, so Sonos may end up with a box of pants here - time will tell.

I'll also say

What's a sonos?

[cascadingstylesheet]

Ah ... ok.

Alphabet?

[Fuzi719]

You can bet that Alphabet/Google is going to investigate this with precision and if any of the resulting "voice" system is found to be using any Google IP, Sonos will be sued into oblivion. The Karma train is fueling up!

Sonos Updates Breaking Integrations

[kordlesss]

I've had Sonos from the beginning. I use it to listen to Pandora and sometimes Spotify. I never added my local music to it. The UI has been pretty much the same from the beginning, split into weird pane views that usually have huge areas of blank space. Not pretty. The client updates itself regularly (usually forced) and about a year and a half ago I bought the Sonos One product which has Alexa "built in". More often than not, when the updates would run, it would bork the Alexa integration. When it was wo