New Sonos Smart Speakers with Voice Assistants Coming Michael Kwan August 18, 2017 News I was first introduced to Sonos smart speakers four years ago and I’ve been a pretty big fan ever since. I’ve got a PLAYBAR in the living room, a PLAY:1 in the bedroom, and a PLAY:5 in the kitchen. The thing is that the world of smart home audio has changed a lot in four years. People expect to talk to their speakers now too, so it only makes sense that a new family of Sonos smart speakers are on the way to compete in this growing arena. You could argue that this whole trend toward smart voice assistants started with the Amazon Echo family, which has now expanded to include touchscreens and judgmental cameras too. There’s the Google Home with Google Assistant, the Harman Kardon Invoke with Cortana, and the Apple Homepod with Siri. Sonos has got to get with the times. While the company hasn’t made any formal announcement just yet, it’s dropped some rather heavy-handed hints that it’s working on a new set of Sonos smart speakers that will come with microphones and voice assistants. More specifically, it sounds like (no pun intended) that these new speakers will come with Alexa. An update to the privacy policy says that a “voice-enabled Sonos Product” will “listen” for a “specific wake word” to activate voice control. The Alexa integration is currently in private beta, but the update “also covers future voice experiences like additional voice assistants and any future products with integrated microphones,” a Sonos rep told Variety. Since none of the existing Sonos products boast far-field microphones, this likely means that a new family of Sonos smart speakers are on the way and they may or may not resemble the current product line at all. Naturally, we have no information on timeline at this point, but we’ll be following this story closely as it develops in the weeks and months to come. Share This With The World!
