Today in New York, Sonos spoke to us in the audience about a beautiful replacement to the Play: 1 but also provided an update for those who’ve invested into the Sonos ecosystem already. Well, some new features are coming.
The Sonos app which helps you manage 80 audio services and all your speakers in your house will be receiving a complete redesign in the latest update. The whole look and feel has changed making it actually look like the Apple Music app. Music that you love takes front and centre, the sources of the tracks is almost irrelevant. The toolbar is at the bottom now and it actually all seems to flow rather seamlessly. This update is available now for iOS and Android so go get it!
If you own an Alexa product (Echo, Echo dot etc) then a public beta has opened today allowing you to control your existing Sonos system through voice. It is a beta so it may have some bugs but from our experiences, it is working really well. You’ll be able to use voice to command your favourite song in any room of the house, control volume and even ask what song is currently playing. Working with Spotify, this feature is going to allow you to control playlists too, waking up in the morning and asking Alexa to “play your morning playlist” will trigger the named Spotify playlist to run throughout the house.
This might have been, personally, the biggest news. If you’re doing something on your iOS device that has audio which you’d prefer to hear on your awesome Sonos speakers then AirPlay2 will enable this in early 2018. You could be watching a YouTube video on your iPad and hearing it on your Play: 5. You could then control the audio from the device or from the speaker, you could also pause and skip from the speaker itself too. This control will further extend the capabilities of your speakers as you’ll be able to use them in entirely new ways.
A small note for now but this is going to be a bigger deal later. Over 100 companies are working with Sonos on API integrations. For smart home products, the ability to work with the speakers that exist in your home already is a huge bonus. Imagine your internet connected doorbell using your speakers to chime (for example). Sonos has created a certification model for customers to know which products support Sonos with a “Works with Sonos” badge for their products. Expect to start seeing this emerge more and more as products are released from their new partners.
Geoff Quattromani travelled to New York as a guest of Sonos
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