Sonos One Debuts Amazon’s Alexa in Canada for Voice Controls

Sonos released an update today to add Amazon’s Alexa to its Sonos One speaker, bringing voice control to the latter, as promised.

Canadians now join Sonos One users in the U.S., UK and Germany with access to Alexa, now gaining full voice control for streaming services including Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. For all other music services, Alexa on Sonos One will be able to pause, skip, volume up and down, and asking what’s currently playing. There is no Apple Music support for Alexa, as that is limited to Siri on HomePod.

Later this year, Sonos One will gain AirPlay 2 support and Google Assistant support, adding more value to the smart speaker.

“We are all about giving customers the freedom to choose the streaming services and voice assistants they want in their homes, and bringing Alexa to our entire home sound system in Canada is a big milestone for us” said Antoine Leblond, VP of Software at Sonos, in a press release issued to iPhone in Canada.

The Sonos One update for Alexa is now available. First, you need to update the Sonos app in the App Store. Once that’s complete, the app will inform you a system update is available to install.

Once you’ve installed the system update, you’ll now see ‘Amazon Alexa’ under Voice Services. You will be required to connect your Amazon account, download the Alexa iOS app, then verify music services on Alexa. If you’re already signed into your Amazon iOS app, it’ll jump to the latter for you to grant permission for access. There are some steps involved but overall, it’s a seamless process.

With Alexa now installed on Sonos One, you’ll now see the microphone LED lit up, showing you the speaker is now ‘listening’.

The Alexa iOS app will now display your Sonos One in its list of devices, allowing you to customize what you want to hear for weather, news, sports and more. In our initial tests, Alexa on Sonos One works well, thanks to the speaker’s six-mic array and adaptive noise suppression algorithm, which will also help distinguish Alexa voice profiles, which launched earlier this month.

Sonos One is available for $249 CAD on Amazon.ca and we’ve been comparing it to Apple’s HomePod in our early tests of the latter (review coming). Users can easily setup a Sonos One stereo pair, for the price of one HomePod. Click here to read our Sonos One review.