Connect Sonos with Alexa: Here’s how

The smart speakers Arc, Beam, One, Move and Roam from Sonos also offer your Alexa a home if you would like to control your system with the Amazon voice assistant. In fact, various functions in the smart home can not only be activated via Echo microphones: they can also be used with hardware from Sonos, which even allows setting up as a stereo pair via Alexa.

Sonos instead of Echo in the smart home with Alexa

For an audiophile audience with a penchant for modern multiroom systems, Sonos is a solid balancing act between smart connection options and higher-quality hi-fi hardware. If you now control your smart home via Alexa, you can also buy Sonos devices instead of the usually mediocre Echos. These can then be integrated not only to play media, but also to enter commands via voice.

This is what you need to connect Alexa and Sonos

To use Sonos speakers with Alexa, the Sonos and Alexa accounts must be paired with each other. This works via the Amazon Alexa app for iOS and Android, but also requires the Sonos Controller app to be present and activated on the device used for setup.

Alexa voice commands for Sonos

Once the pairing between Sonos and Alexa is complete and you have selected and set up your Sonos speakers via the Alexa app, you can get started with the voice commands. Make sure the microphone on the speaker is switched on and from now on use voice commands such as:

• “Alexa, play songs to meditate.”
• “Alexa, keep playing.”
• “Alexa, what’s the weather?”
• “Alexa, play Lorde in the living room.”
• “Alexa, dim the lights in the dining room.”
• “Alexa, stop.”

A notice: Various Alexa commands require additional hardware connected to Alexa, which must also be connected to the Amazon instance. Read here how this works, for example with the smart light bulbs from Philips Hue.

Control Smart TV with Alexa via Sonos

If your Sonos system is connected to your TV via HDMI-ARC, you can also control it using Alexa voice commands. Once the connection between the Sonos and Alexa accounts is complete and the connection is made via cable, the following voice commands, among others, work:

• “Alexa, turn the TV on/off.”
• “Alexa, turn up the volume.”
• “Alexa, set the mode to TV.”
• “Alexa, switch to voice enhancement mode in the living room.”
• “Alexa, switch to night mode in the living room.”

Echo vs. Sonos: Better sound is not always the better choice

Even if high-quality music playback is possible with Sonos, the relatively expensive smart speakers are not always the better choice when building a smart home.

Although most Echo devices in the Sonos product fleet are clearly inferior in terms of sound, even after connecting to Alexa, the smart speakers do not support all of the voice commands that you might use more often via an Echo.

Sonos Support points this out, as does Amazon on the Sonos Skill download page: The Drop-In, voice calls, messages, notifications and reminders functions cannot be used with the Sonos One and the Beam.

These limitations are certainly not a fiasco if Sonos is primarily used for music playback. However, if you want to use all the usual Alexa functions via every speaker in your smart home and are more likely to compromise on sound, you are not necessarily better off with a relatively high-priced Sonos device than with a larger Echo model such as the Echo Studio or Echo Show 10.

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