Update 1/26/18 (4:02 PM ET): Sonos has clarified that it intends to make both Alexa and Google Assistant accessible to users on the same device later this year. Our original story follows.
Original post: Audio device maker Sonos this week announced a deal in which it will offer two of its Sonos One smart speakers for $349. The offer, a $49 discount, went live at various retailers on Friday. It will remain in effect for “a limited time,” according to the company.
The deal appears designed to fend off any traction that Apple might gain with its much-anticipated HomePod speaker, which launched on Friday for the same $349 price tag. Apple has advertised the HomePod as a small Internet-connected home speaker focused on audio quality, a market category where Sonos has been strong in recent years. Like the Sonos One, Google Home, and Amazon Echo, the HomePod will also connect to a voice assistant—in this case, Siri—to answer questions, send messages, and play music, among other tasks.
That said, the HomePod is launching with a few significant caveats: It won’t be able to pair with a second HomePod and stream multi-room audio, its voice commands do not support any music streaming service besides Apple Music, and Siri is generally seen as inferior to Alexa and Google Assistant for this class of device. It’s also relatively expensive.
Sonos seems more than willing to harp on these concerns. It issued a blog post on Thursday chastising the lack of “openness” on competing devices (read: HomePod) while promoting its own speakers’ ability to work with several music services. That’s a bit misleading: Sonos tends to funnel users through its own app and requires services to work with its platform before they’re available to stream on its devices, as none of its speakers work with Bluetooth.
Nevertheless, the company promises that its speakers will support Apple’s AirPlay 2 protocol sometime in 2018, which will allow them to stream audio from any source and use Siri from an Apple device. It also says that the Sonos One, which currently works with Amazon’s Alexa assistant, will gain support for the Google Assistant later this year.
The company has not specified if it would offer Alexa and Google Assistant on the same device, something no major smart speaker has done, or merely offer a separate Sonos One model that only supports the latter, though. When asked for comment, a Sonos representative said: “In the same way that Sonos has remained agnostic with streaming services, now supporting more than 80 globally, Sonos One will work with both Alexa and Google Assistant in 2018.”
In any event, we reviewed the Sonos One late last year and were generally impressed: It takes nearly all the smarts of any other Alexa-enabled device and puts them in a speaker that sounds notably richer and fuller than an Echo or Google Home. It certainly has its flaws—it can’t pair with a separate Sonos Play:1 device (which further hinders Sonos’ “openness” argument), it can’t control every major music service with voice commands, it irresponsibly uses the outdated SMBv1 file sharing protocol, and the Sonos app still can feel clunky—but it has gained the ability to control Spotify through Alexa since launch.
We’ll have to put the HomePod through its paces to see how it compares to the Sonos One on its own, but the deal here may appeal to those who want a voice-enabled speaker and aren’t already tucked into the world of Apple. Alternatively, they could put that $349 toward a half-dozen Amazon Echo Dots and connect them to speakers from any other manufacturer.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1249499