Jordan O'BrienWe’re still waiting for Sonos to launch support for the Google Assistant, but we’re now getting more details as to what that will entail when it finally arrives. That’s because Sonos has confirmed that Google Assistant support won’t only be coming to the Sonos One and Beam smart speakers, which are the only two products in the firm’s line-up with far-field microphones, but that it’ll also be coming to older products, which could include the Play:1, Play:5 and the Playbar.
Sonos hasn’t exactly confirmed which of its ‘older’ speakers will be supported by the Google Assistant, but we can imagine it will mimic what’s available with Amazon’s Alexa. That means rather than using the Sonos device as a standalone smart speaker, the older speakers will require a secondary device in order to gain Google Assistant control. If that’s the case, then the vast majority of Sonos’ non-voice enabled offerings should be controllable through something like the Google Home Mini or even the Sonos One.
We’re still holding out hope that Sonos will go further with its adoption of the Google Assistant than it has with Alexa, however. The company has lacked many of Amazon’s best features, with support lacking for certain skills and the absence of multi-room audio with third-party Alexa devices. Thus far, devices shipping with the Google Assistant have been feature-packed and capable of linking into a multi-room audio system using the Chromecast protocol – hopefully that makes the jump to the Sonos family of devices.
Unfortunately, Sonos isn’t yet committing to a date for its Google Assistant roll-out. That’s disappointing considering the firm initially promised it would be out in 2018, before pushing it back to 2019 after realising it wouldn’t finish in time. It did say that the beta testing would begin last year, however, so we’re hopeful that it won’t be too much longer to wait.