Jordan O'BrienThe Sonos One could make the perfect Christmas gift, but its lack of Spotify control through Alexa could be a deal breaker for some. Thankfully, Sonos is promising the Alexa voice control for Spotify will be available in time for present unwrapping, in fact, the company notes the feature should roll out by December 21.
Neither the Sonos One or a Sonos speaker paired together with an Amazon Echo Dot are able to start playing music from Spotify with voice control. Although users are able to pause, skip tracks, and adjust volume as long as Spotify is already playing. That doesn’t help users who want to choose a song through voice control, however.
Alexa on Sonos is already capable of playing music from Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn Radio, and SiriusXM. Sonos has promised to open up even more services in the future, including Apple Music, although Spotify is currently the priority.
The delay between launch and supporting Spotify is an odd one. Alexa can play music from Spotify on an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot, but for some reason it doesn’t support devices from other manufacturers. It’s not just Sonos that is experiencing the issue either, other brands that have baked in Alexa’s voice assistant have also found this limitation – including Ultimate Ears.
Spotify is by far the world’s most popular music streaming service, and companies will want to get it on board in order to ship their speakers. It seems that Google’s voice assistant doesn’t have the same issues, however. Panasonic and Sony’s third-party offerings which pack the Google Assistant both support Spotify.