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Sonos’ smart speakers could one day integrate with all digital assistants

By Christian de Looper January 20, 2017

sonos assistant integration play1 speaker kit 5 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

It looks like smart speaker service Sonos is set to go through a very interesting few years. It’s fair to say that the likes of smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home have eaten into Sonos’ market, but that doesn’t mean the company has any animosity toward Amazon and Google. On the contrary, newly minted Sonos CEO Patrick Spence wants Sonos’ speakers to play nice with all the new digital assistants flooding the smart speaker market.

“We know that life at home requires the support of a variety of services,” said Spence in an internal memo sent out to the company and obtained by The Verge. “We are going to do the same with voice services, bringing all the services that matter to every home.”

We already knew that Sonos was planning some level of integration with Amazon Alexa, so it’s nice to see that non-Alexa users will also get some digital assistant love from Sonos sometime in the future. There’s no timeline for this yet, so it could be months or even years before we see integration with Google Assistant.

The memo doesn’t only reference digital assistants — it also talks about the need to be more innovative, and highlights why the new CEO knows what he’s doing in leading the company.

It’s likely we’ll see more digital assistant integration into all our devices over the next few years. The digital assistant space is seriously heating up, with many smartphone manufacturers now developing their own assistants.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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