Several months ago, Sonos revealed plans to bring voice control to its popular home audio speakers. Today at an event in New York City, the company shared more on its approach to letting users play music by speaking commands aloud instead of controlling everything by thumbing through the Sonos app. In short, it’s all about Alexa and Echo. Beginning in 2017, anyone with an Alexa-enabled device — right now that’s he Echo, Tap, or Dot — will be able to control Sonos speakers with voice commands.
When Sonos made that announcement, the company praised the Amazon Echo heavily. At the time, I thought that Sonos may try to compete with the Echo, Siri and Google Now directly by developing their own system. While that may still happen, Sonos is hooking their wagon to Amazon for now. I’m curious to see how this plays out, or if Amazon ends up buying the company outright at some point.