Sonos One speaker now has Amazon Alexa assistant enabled

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Owners of the Sonos One smart speaker are getting a delightful surprise today as the Amazon Alexa smart assistant is now enabled and offers a variety of welcome features. Users who are also subscribed to services like Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, TuneIn Radio and other streaming music services can simply ask their Sonos One to find and play music by song, artist, genre or playlist.

For users who have the Sonos One as part of a multi-room, multi-speaker setup, the $249 CAD smart speaker can now ask Alexa to play music on specific speakers or rooms which simplifies the process of managing a variety of sources and playback devices.

Music fans in Canada now join those in the US, UK, and Germany who can ask Amazon Alexa to control their entire Sonos home sound system with full voice support for Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. Voice controls like pause, skip, volume up and down, and asking what’s currently playing are available for all other music services that Sonos supports. Alexa functionality is currently only available in English.

“We are all about giving customers the freedom to choose the streaming services and voice assistants they want in their homes, and bringing Alexa to our entire home sound system in Canada is a big milestone for us” said Antoine Leblond, VP of Software at Sonos.

 In addition to supporting English voice control for some of the most popular streaming services, Sonos One will also allow owners to enjoy other great things people love about Alexa – they can hear the latest updates from The Weather Network, listen to news and traffic reports from CBC Radio, receive travel updates from Air Canada, and control their Alexa-enabled smart home devices. And with continuous free updates from both Sonos One and Alexa, new features, services and skills will be unlocked to make the experience better and smarter, including Airplay 2 and Google Assistant support which will be available this year.

The Alexa update makes an already compelling speaker even more versatile. Sonos One is clearly the best sounding smart speaker available in Canada at this price-point. What's more is that it can work as a stereo pair for playing back music as it was meant to be heard, plus is supports multi-room MESH connections for high-fidelity audio across a home.

Being an open system, Sonos One is expected to offer Google Home functionality and even Apple AirPlay 2 compatibility later this year.