Alexa can control Apple Music on Sonos speakers in a handful of countries

Unfortunately, we aren’t included there yet. But listeners in the US, the UK, and Ireland can now use Alexa to control Apple Music on their Sonos speakers, specifically the Sonos One, Beam, or Echo devices. You need to enable the Apple Music skill on the Alexa app and link your account. And if you can’t set the service as your default, you will have to add the words “on Apple Music” to your requests.

Sonos One and Beam get Alexa Announcements

Amazon has started to bring one of the useful features of Alexa to the Sonos One and Beam: Alexa Announcements. This feature will let you broadcast one-way messages to all Alexa-enabled devices in your house. So, if you want to call your family for dinner or remind them about bed time, you can do it with these Alexa-enabled Sonos speakers. It’s coming first to Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom and will be available for English messages for now. The firmware update to enable this feature should be coming your way now so keep an eye out for it. You don’t need to do anything as it’ll automatically just update your speaker when it’s idle.

Don’t expect old Sonos speakers to get AirPlay 2 support

If you don’t own a Sonos Beam, Playbase, One, or second-gen Play:5, don’t expect to get support for AirPlay 2. In an interview with Engadget, Sonos Chief Product Office Nick Millington talked about what plans it had for the older speakers that doesn’t get support for AirPlay. Millington said the company would rather concentrate on ensuring the longevity of these old speakers instead of just bringing new technology into them for the sake of it. One way to do that is bringing an update that will let the Play:1 speaker work in multiple rooms. Millington said, “We decided that AirPlay 2 was a bit too much of a commitment of the remaining resources and RAM and processor inside that product.”

Sonos promises to add Google Assistant support to its One speaker before the end of 2018

Sonos seems to have finally set a deadline for itself. The Verge reported that the company plans to bring Google Assistant to its Sonos One speaker before the end of the year. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence told The Verge that Sonos is “working as hard as we can and so is Google to get it ready” in time for the holiday season. The Sonos One already supports Amazon Alexa and even has AirPlay 2 functionality to support Apple users. And if we do get Assistant soon, it’ll make the speaker an even more attractive purchase.

Source: 9to5Google