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Sonos Secures Amazon Alexa Integration

Sonos’ software vice president Antoine Leblond has revealed that the company will be integrating support for Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa to its range of speakers via software later this year.

Leblond said that the company is still working with Amazon on fine-tuning some requirements and details of the software.

The support will be added in via software but no specific release-window has been details.

Back in March 2016, the then-CEO of Sonos John Macfarlane evangelised the potential of Alexa, calling it “the first product to really showcase the power of voice control in the home”.

At the time, Macfarlane said “Sonos is taking the long view in how best to bring voice-enabled music experiences into the home. Voice is a big change for us, so we’ll invest what’s required to bring it to market in a wonderful way”.

Reports from Business Insider journalists present at the announcement at an event in Boston say that the integration works well, though in its current form users had to say “on Sonos” at the end of sentences.

Leblond confirmed that the feature isn’t likely to make its way to public audiences, saying “when we make this publicly available, all you’ll have to say is ‘Alexa, play music’ or something like that.”

New Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is also understood to have expressed a commitment to rolling out Sonos support for other voice assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant in the future.

Users will need both a Sonos wireless sound system and Amazon Echo Dot, currently not available in Australia, to access the feature. So for Australian audiences, the feature might arrive a little later than expected.

Meanwhile, Sonos’ rival Bose is also reportedly pushing ahead on its own Alexa compatability (due for an early 2017 launch).

 



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