Sonos Voice Assistant — control Sonos speakers without Alexa or Google Assistant

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Sonos Voice Assistant lets you control music on your Sonos speakers

Sonos One
(Image credit: Future)

Sonos Voice Assistant offers hands-free speaker control for Sonos speakers with built-in microphones.

As you might know, Sonos speakers were some of the earliest third-party devices to offer Alexa and Google Assistant. These days the best smart speakers stem from a larger variety of companies, though Sonos is betting some customers don’t consider support for Amazon’s and Google’s assistants a priority.

Instead, Sonos now offers a way to launch playlists, control playback and move sound around a Sonos system using just your voice. Unlike with Alexa and Google Assistant, you can’t ask the Sonos Voice Assistant for a weather report or the current Yankees game score. The assistant’s abilities are intentionally limited to the music-listening experience.

When awoken, the microphone stays active for 6 seconds so that you can change the volume more than once without saying “Hey Sonos” each time. Some other reasons to use the voice assistant is to search new radio stations, find out the name of an unfamiliar song that came up on a playlist and move your music around your Sonos system. Though SL speakers can’t field Sonos Voice Assistant queries, they can be controlled by voice through another Sonos speaker with a microphone.

Kate Kozuch
Kate Kozuch

Kate Kozuch is the managing editor of social and video at Tom’s Guide. She writes about smartwatches, TVs, audio devices, and some cooking appliances, too. Kate appears on Fox News to talk tech trends and runs the Tom's Guide TikTok account, which you should be following if you don't already. When she’s not filming tech videos, you can find her taking up a new sport, mastering the NYT Crossword or channeling her inner celebrity chef.