There's an easy way for Sonos to make its speakers so much better
Sonos and Alexa would be a match made in heaven.
That's because the biggest problem with Sonos' line of wifi connected speakers - which sound great - is that playing music can be a chore.
To play something on Sonos, you need to open the app on your phone, tablet, or computer, find the song, radio station, or podcast, and tell the system which speaker you want to play it.
Contrast that with the simplicity of playing something on Amazon Echo, the highly-regarded connected speaker from Amazon. Echo, and soon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap, harness the power of Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based voice service, so you can simply utter the word "Alexa" to ask the device to do a host of tasks for you, including playing music, setting an alarm, summoning an Uber, or even ordering a pizza.
But here's the thing - it's totally possible for Sonos to integrate Alex in Echo, and the company wouldn't have to pay anything. In June, Amazon announced the Alexa Skills Set, a program for developers and hardware makers to integrate Alex's voice-driven capabilities to their devices.
That means that any hardware company can essentially use Alexa for free.
Invoxia, a French telecom company, has said that it's incorporating Alexa into future versions of its Triby, a connected speaker for the kitchen (it has a magnet on the back so you can stick it to a fridge.)
When Amazon opens up Alexa to developers, it not only gets information that improves its voice system, but it also gets valuable data about how consumers behave - what they want, what they do at home, and more, which it can use to better predict what you want to buy. It also gets more people into the Amazon ecosystem.
Sonos should integrate Amazon, and I wouldn't be surprised if the company has plans to following the its announcement Wednesday night that it's going through a restructuring and will focus on voice assistants like Alexa. (The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday morning.)
Using Alexa would be much easier for Sonos than developing its own voice recognition system, and instead, it could use its resources to do what it does best - make great sounding speakers.
We're fans of what Amazon has done with Alexa and the Echo product line. Voice recognition isn't new; today it's nearly ubiquitous with Siri, OK Google, and Cortana. But the Echo found a sweet spot in the home and will impact how we navigate music, weather, and many, many other things as developers bring new ideas and more content to the Alexa platform.
Its popularity with consumers will accelerate innovation across the entire industry. What is novel today will become standard tomorrow. Here again, Sonos is taking the long view in how best to bring voice-enabled music experiences into the home. Voice is a big change for us, so we'll invest what's required to bring it to market in a wonderful way.
Let's hope that setting an alarm or listening to a song on the next Sonos speaker may be as easy ask asking your speaker to do it for you.