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.

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Review: Sonos One Smart Speaker

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Sonos is considered the originator of wireless streaming audio. The company’s innovative MESH network solution enabled high fidelity audio streamed across multiple rooms simultaneously (or independently). Sonos speakers have been considered the gold standard in audio quality and precision while their software has long been the envy of other speaker manufacturers.

2017 has been a challenging year for Sonos. While the company continued to unveil well-received speakers and sound bars, they are seeing unprecedented competition not just from cheaper smart speakers with built-in assistants. They are also seeing companies like Google and Apple jump into the premium connected speaker space, presumably with smart assistant functionality. Now, Sonos has answered that challenge.

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WWDC 2017: Apple enters smart speaker space with HomePod

Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

San Jose, CA - Apple gave delegates to its yearly WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) a sneak peek at their new HomePod smart home speaker. At just under 7 inches tall, HomePod represents years of hardware and software innovation at Apple, including spatial awareness that allows HomePod to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio to deliver a great music experience, a large, Apple-designed woofer and a custom array of seven beam-forming tweeters.

“Apple reinvented portable music with iPod and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “HomePod packs powerful speaker technology, Siri intelligence and wireless access to the entire Apple Music library into a beautiful speaker"

Coming to the US and UK in December, HomePod is powered by an Apple A8 processor, it integrates Siri, has access to Apple Music's 40 million song library and can also control IoT and connected home devices by serving ans a HomeKit hub.