Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes.
Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes.
If you're tired of Alexa and Google listening, local voice is a real thing now.
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I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.
The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.
Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.
Except it's been in the news that they only support their products for 5 years after release. So as Apple and other streaming services update over the years, your Sonos will stop working.
I think an important correction here is that they say they will only commit to a minimum of 5 years of software updates after they stop selling a particular model.
Even then, there is no reason the speaker wouldn’t still work. To me, that sounds perfectly reasonable. There’s posts about a 15 year old play 5 speaker getting a firmware update within the last year even, so I think Sonos deserves credit where credit is due. They have a proven track record so far, but no doubt it’s something to keep an eye on going forward.
Sonos deserves credit where credit is due.
For five years. I'm not buying shit on a hope and a wish that they'll still support it in 7 years. I'm old enough to know better.
Ok - agree to disagree! Just wanted to share my experience with the community on a quality local voice control that’s available today while the home assistant community works on these exciting developments.
Sonos can suck it for locking settings behind an app that requires your GPS in order to function.
Seriously, connecting to the device through your computer gives you less settings than on your phone.
I tried the local voice assistant on my Sonos a while back and did like how well it worked to play music but at the time it didn’t support Spotify so it was a no-go. Do they now?
Do you know whether it supports locations and timers? For example I can tell Alexa “Play Eminem in the Family Room for one hour”
Can confirm timer works - set a 5 minute timer for playing music in the family room).
Spotify does work with Sonos now (I don’t use it but I have my account set up with it), but voice control does not work with Spotify.
Thanks. Sorry for being unclear: I use Spotify on my Sonos speakers all the time but was concerned about Sonos Voice working with Spotify. I guess it’s still a “no”
FYI- I received an email the other day that sonos officially added voice control for Spotify!
Excellent! Thanks for posting: I’ll have to give it a try
Oh shit, I'm going to have to shop Sonos then
I never thought I’d be the kind of person to use voice commands, but it is so nice to tell it to turn on the radio while I’m cooking dinner!