Last month, Sonos announced their all-new voice control. Things that it had going for were “unmatched privacy” and the ability to continue a conversation without needing to say “Hey Sonos” multiple times.
And the company promised to roll out the assistant with a free update to all of the compatible soundbars and speakers in early June.
Now it’s here! And Sonos has managed to deliver all of the claims they were making during the announcement. As you have read the title, the voice assistant is only available for some select models.
Currently, it seems like Sonos voice control is only compatible with the soundbars and speakers with a built-in microphone. And that makes total sense!
That said, the setup process for the Sonos voice control is pretty similar to any new feature that Sonos drops. In other words, you can set the Sonos voice control up for your speakers with the Sonos app.
Now, if you do not have it installed, the good news is that you can find the app on both iOS and Android devices. And in most cases, the feature setup process will take just five minutes.
Once you set the Sonos voice control up, you can ask the assistant to start playing music from a handful of services.
That includes Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Sonos Radio, and Deezer. And just like the announcement, the Sonos voice control activates when you say “Hey Sonos” near your speaker.
But playing music from the stated services is not all that the Sonos voice control can offer. After you activate the assistant, you can ask it to pause and skip music, tell you which song is currently playing, and adjust the volume.
In short, the Sonos voice control will let you control the speaker system. Along with that, you can control your entire Sonos system with Sonos voice control.
It will be possible to remove or add speakers from a group and enable music playback on all of the Sonos devices that are in your home. And in terms of adding and removing speakers, you will not need to worry whether the new speakers you are adding have speakers or not.
Just like the official demo showed us, the Sonso voice control is voiced by an actor named Giancarlo Esposito.
However, he doesn’t talk much. And that is exactly what the voice assistant has going for. Sonos has designed the assistant to minimize the overall number of responses and keep playing the music at the forefront.
Now, when it comes to privacy, Sonos has made the voice control process all of the requests locally on the speaker. So, none of your commands will transmit back to Sonos or the cloud.
Slava is a man of mystery and no-one seems to know exactly where he is at any point in time. When he isn't enjoying writing about all things audio and technical he can be found researching his next project of interest. The man never rests.