Sonos to launch its own voice assistant amid problems with Alexa and Google, report claims

(Sonos)

Sonos is launching its own voice assistant, the latest in a range of new additions to its product lines.

For years, Sonos was known for making internet-enabled speakers for the home. But recently it has added many more offerings: speakers that can be taken on the move, its own radio stations, and rumours of headphones.

Now it is planning on launching its own voice assistant to compete with Amazon Alexa and Google’s Assistant, according to a new report in The Verge. The new feature will be arriving in the next few weeks, with a software update in the US that will be followed by a wider release elsewhere.

Sonos has been reported to be working on a voice assistant for some time. Clues that it has been in the works have even leaked in its own products, as well as surveys sent to customers.

The voice assistant will work with a range of streaming audio services, The Verge said, though it reported that Sonos is not yet enrolled.

It will differentiate itself from other such services in part by Sonos’s commitment to privacy, which will mean that audio won’t be sent to its services to be processed. That could also make it quicker, with the new report indicating it will be faster than Alexa and the Google Assistant.

Sonos has had troubles with Amazon and Google and their voice assistants. Its chief executive, Patrick Spence, said during US hearings that it was held back by policies that did not allow the two voice assistants to be enabled at the same time, for instance, and that Sonos was not able to include some of its own features.

The leak comes just days after Sonos was reported to be planning a new hardware product, named the Sonos Ray, that will function as a TV speaker and come at a much lower price than its existing Beam.

But the voice assistant will work on all of Sonos’s newer speakers, so long as they can run its more recent S2 software, The Verge reported. Most of those newer speakers include built-in microphones – though some, differentiated with the name “SL”, leave them out for a cheaper price and to soothe privacy concerns.