If everything is correct, it seems that Sonos intends to create its own voice assistant . With it, it would not seek to compete against other options that are more popular and used by everyone, such as Alexa or Google Assistant, but rather offer extra value for its users when performing certain actions.
Hey Sonos
Sonos seems to be sending out some surveys to its users to get their opinions about the possibility of creating or, rather, having a voice assistant of their own on their speakers. In this way and through a command that would surely be of the type “Hey Sonos” or a “Hey Sonos” in case of doing it in Spanish, you could interact with your speakers without the need for physical contact or resorting to the official application for mobile devices.
That would be the main idea of Sonos Voice Control, offering a series of new options to users to carry out tasks such as being able to group speakers to generate stereo sound as long as they are compatible or a multiroom system or composed of several speakers for a better listening experience. It would also serve to control playback, the volume at which they would sound and even the possibility of using these commands to control the playback of songs, albums or lists that we may be interested in listening to through the different services offered by the company.
That is, it would be practically allowing everything that Amazon, Google or Apple speaker users offer with their respective assistants Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri.
What about Alexa and Google Assistant
If you are a Sonos user, you will already know. If not, we will tell you. Today Sonos speakers support not one but two of the most popular voice assistants on the market: Alexa and Google Assistant . Siri, of course, is still exclusive to Apple’s own products and it does not seem that anything will change in that regard in the short term.
However, on a Sonos speaker you can choose which assistant you want to use. So if you already have options to take advantage of the full potential of voice commands, why else? Well, the idea of Sonos is not to replace them, just to place it on top.
In this way, for all those actions that we mentioned before, you would use the “Hey Sonos” and to take advantage of the rest of the possibilities when it comes to controlling the home automation, knowing the time or answering other questions, you would resort to Alexa.
Yes, if you remember at the beginning of the year Amazon announced its Alexa Custom Assistant . A program that with which they were going to allow third parties to take advantage of the entire base that serves to equip Alexa with intelligence. So the wake-up command could be customized, and we guessed that would be what Sonos is planning.
Thus, with this personalized control, you could have your own assistant for the actions that you are interested in controlling and that Alexa cannot for some reason. Then, for everything else I would use Alexa , even if the activation command “Alexa,….” used in Amazon Echo or compatible speakers.
We’ll see what happens, but the truth is that it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Even less if they manage to, perhaps, in future versions of Sonos speakers, those most basic commands are executed without the need for an internet connection, locally. But that would be another story. What is clear is that Alexa clones may not take long to appear.
