![]() Included in Wednesday’s announcements was that support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 comes to Sonos sometime in 2018. AirPlay 2 – The back door through which Siri enters ![]() ![]() This means you could use the Sonos app to start playing something from Apple Music and still control playback with your voice using Alexa.įor today, this is as good as it gets for Apple Music users wanting voice control of your music with Sonos (unless you’re willing to do the aforementioned geeky dancing, of course). Once a song, album, or playlist is playing on your Sonos units, any control option – Alexa included – can be used to pause, change the volume, skip tracks, and even identify which song is playing. “Continuity of control” is a phrase that they have thrown around a lot lately, and they don’t mean it lightly. The good news is that Sonos puts a high value – and dedicates a lot of engineering time and resources – to ensuring a consistent playback experience. Sonos’s Continuity of Control to the Rescue Despite the fact that the setup and maintenance of this is non-optimal and unsupported, it’s the solution that my family and I still prefer to use. As an Apple Music subscriber I’m not necessarily sure I agree this was the right choice, especially having experienced the latter via a very geeky solution I wrote up last year. ![]() Had Sonos instead built a typical Alexa remote control skill, you could then control any service you added to Sonos, but you’d have to say, “Alexa, tell Sonos to play Stevie Wonder.” Sonos execs all emphasized their desire to avoid the “tell Sonos” scenario. This deeper-integration allows you to say, “Alexa, play Stevie Wonder” and have it come out of your Sonos speakers, but limits your music services to those which are enabled on your Alexa account, and that means no Apple Music. In building its voice integration, Sonos chose to make their speakers an extension of Alexa instead of just a service which was Alexa-controllable. The good news is that Sonos also announced AirPlay 2 would be coming to their speakers in 2018, and that might just provide the voice control Apple Music subscribers want. On Wednesday, Sonos rolled out voice-control support via both a free software update for existing customers and with their new Sonos One speaker, but this new solution leaves Apple Music users wanting more.
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