News

The Sonos voice assistant will launch on June 1

Great, another voice assistant…

by
Joe Rice-Jones
May 11, 2022

Image: Unsplash

UPDATE 5/11/2022 4:37 PM ET: A new report from The Verge notes that Sonos has confirmed that its voice assistant will launch on June 1 in the US, with plans for France later this year. You can read the original report below.

Sonos is just weeks away from announcing its own voice assistant, according to The Verge. Sonos Voice will be offered alongside Alexa and Google Assistant and provide another way to control Sonos’ devices.

The Verge‘s sources say that the software update for Sonos Voice will come to US users on June 1st, with plans to expand it internationally after that. It’ll be available for any device that runs Sonos’ S2 software.

Now, forget that Sonos has (presumably) spent large sums of money on creating Sonos Voice. Forget that the company is still actively recruiting for the project. Forget that sometimes the integrations between streaming apps and existing voice assistants don’t always work.

Do we really need another voice assistant that specifically only works on Sonos devices? I mean, my car has a voice assistant, and all of its commands are confusing to me because they require me to remember yet another set of commands.

Even remembering to say “Hey Sonos” to trigger streaming commands is going to annoy me. I already struggle enough with the minor differences between how Alexa and Google Assistant respond to commands.

Will Sonos Voice even work with your favorite streaming service?

Image: Sonos

There are also compatibility issues to address. The Verge says that Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Sonos Radio are all working already with the new voice assistant. That leaves users of Spotify, the most-used music streaming service, and YouTube Music users out in the cold.

They’ll have to switch between multiple voice assistants to use their streaming service of choice. You won’t be able to have Sonos’ voice assistant running while Google Assistant is enabled, either. Alexa, however, can run at the same time as Sonos, so that’s a positive.

The only thing I like so far about Sonos Voice is that it won’t record voice commands, or even send them off-device for processing. Yes, every voice command will stay on your Sonos device, so you won’t have to figure out how to delete the recordings later.

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