We have tested out the Sonos One here at Ausdroid a couple of times, most recently as a pair and we loved it. Officially, Alexa has not worked on Sonos’ smart speaker in Australia, until now with Sonos today announcing that Alexa will be arriving here via a software update.
From today, Sonos are rolling out an update to the Sonos One that enables Alexa voice control. With this new Alexa voice control users can use their voice to control their Sonos home sound system with support for Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio and TuneIn.
Along with support for the above music services, Alexa also supports TEN Eyewitness News, make a reservation with Dimmi, get travel updates from QANTAS and control Alexa-enabled smart home devices. Along with this Alexa update to the Sonos One, Sonos also announced that further software updates this year will also bring support for Airplay 2 and Google Assistant. There was no mention of Chromecast or Google Play Music but we have our fingers crossed.
When we tested the Sonos One smart speaker earlier this year we found that Alexa worked perfectly — but that was after using a VPN to setup an Alexa account late last year. Sonos themselves had issues figuring out how it worked perfectly localised for us. We found the Sonos One to be a high end speaker that sounded amazing, but the smarts on it were lacking. This new update should fix some of these limitations although Alexa is fairly limited in Australia at this stage.
The Sonos One can be purchased from the Sonos website or from retailers for $299 AUD in white and black finishes. If you want a high end speaker with some smarts this is something you should consider.
