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Sonos speakers
Photo: Matthias Kremp / DER SPIEGEL
They're called Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Bixby, just to name a few: voice-controlled digital assistants abound.
Nevertheless, one more will be added: Sonos Voice Control.
In the future, Sonos customers will be able to control the networked loudspeakers of the American company.
The announcement is initially suspicious.
Although Sonos boxes cannot be controlled via Siri to this day, they can be controlled via Alexa and the Google Assistant.
But many customers who own voice-enabled Sonos speakers would not use their voice control because of privacy concerns, says Sébastien Maury, senior director and responsible for the voice experience at Sonos, in an interview with SPIEGEL.
Sonos acquired French company Snips, for which it previously worked, for $37.5 million in late 2019.
The company was interesting for the Americans because it had specialized in developing a language assistant that worked offline.
This is exactly one of the outstanding features of the Sonos Voice Control, as the voice control is very pragmatically called.
It works completely offline.
Everything that users say to the speakers is processed in the devices, and the answer is generated by the devices themselves and not by a server in the cloud.
According to Maury, this will work with all Sonos models that have voice control, including a Beam soundbar from 2018. Other Sonos speakers that are not voice-enabled can also be remotely controlled via a voice-enabled voice control.
In order to make this possible with the low computing power of the devices, the developers concentrated fully on the subject of music.
So you can neither control the smart lamps in the living room nor the vacuum robot via Sonos Voice Control, and questions about the weather forecast or the results of the Bundesliga also come to nothing.
It was clear to them from the start that it was important to focus on the one topic of music, says Maury.
Anyone who has seen the TV series "You better call Saul" and "Breaking Bad" knows the voice that Sonos speakers will use in the future.
It comes from the US actor Giancarlo Esposito, who plays the drug lord Gus Frings in both series.
His voice will only be recognized by those who have seen the series in the American original, because Sonos Voice Control will initially only be available in US English, with a French version to follow later this year.
Sonos does not want to commit to a point in time when other languages will come and, above all, when it will be Germany's turn.
Anyone who still wants to try out the function can do so in Germany from the start on June 1st.
You just have to speak English with your Sonos system.
