After launching here in the Great White North without support for Amazon’s voice-activated personal assistant, Alexa is now available on Sonos One smart speakers in Canada.
Starting today, Canadians use Alexa to issue voice commands to their Sonos One speaker. To enable the functionality, all Sonos One users need to do is download a free software update to their speaker, and ensure they have the Alexa app, available on iOS and Android, installed on their smartphone or tablet.
The voice-activated personal assistant is currently fully compatible with Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio and TuneIn. For all the other more than 80 music services that the speaker manufacturer supports, including Apple Music, Bandcamp and SoundCloud, Sonos users can still use voice commands to control playback (saying commands like pause, skip and volume up or down), they just need to first queue up the song using the Sonos app.
For those with an older Sonos speaker, starting today it’s also possible to control those units using Alexa. However, either an accompanying Sonos One unit or one of Amazon’s Echo speakers is required.
As with other Alexa-enabled devices, the Sonos One is fully compatible with all of Alexa’s other skills, which means Canadian users can ask the personal assistant for things like forecast updates from the Weather network, traffic reports from CBC Radio and more.
Previously, Alexa voice control was only available on Sonos One units in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. For the moment, only English is supported.
Later this year, Sonos will update the Sonos One to support Google Assistant as well.
“We are all about giving customers the freedom to choose the streaming services and voice assistants they want in their homes, and bringing Alexa to our entire home sound system in Canada is a big milestone for us,” said Antoine Leblond, vice-president of software at Sonos, in a February 27th press release sent to MobileSyrup.
“With the Sonos One, we took everything people love about Sonos – an agnostic approach with streaming partners, amazing sound quality, flexibility with multi-room or stereo-pairing capability, a thoughtfully designed speaker that’s easy to use — and added voice as another means to getting music lovers to the songs and sonic content they love.”
The Sonos One is available for $249 in Canada, in either black or white, via Amazon.ca and other major retailers across the country. The smart speaker first launched in Canada on October 24th, 2017.
In his review of the Sonos One, MobileSyrup‘s Ted Kritsonis praised the Sonos One, awarding it a nine out of 10.
