Earlier this month, Sonos announced a brand new smart speaker for its lineup. It’s the Sonos One, which, to not be confused with the Sonos PLAY:1, is an Alexa-enabled speaker. Now the Sonos One and PLAY:1 do share quite a few characteristics. The two do look very similar, although the Sonos One is a bit more stealth looking, without the gray accents. But of course the biggest difference here is that it has Amazon Alexa included, and it will be getting the Google Assistant in 2018.
The Sonos One offers up that great multi-room audio that you know and love from Sonos, but now with better Alexa integration. Before, the Sonos PLAY:1 and other speakers had Alexa support, but it was simply to play music on a Sonos speaker. With the Sonos One, you can do basically everything you could do with an Amazon Echo. There are a few differences though, as Amazon has decided to keep a number of music services exclusive to its own Alexa products instead of allowing it to work with all of the Alexa products, including third-party ones. But it does still work with Google Play Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, TuneIn and a number of others.
On top of listening to music with Alexa, you can also control your smart home, with the Sonos One. To set this up, you’ll initially use the Sonos app to set up Sonos One and connect to Amazon, from there, all of your skills will be available on the Sonos One instantly. So you can control your light bulbs, your Nest Thermostat and many other smart home products as well. Of course, there are other Alexa skills available from Ford, Hyundai, Domino’s, GrubHub and plenty of others. Now the Sonos One is available in both black and white, and is priced at the same $199 that its successor the PLAY:1 was priced at. Making it one of the more expensive speakers with Alexa built-in, but definitely one of the better sounding Alexa-enabled speakers on the market. You can pick yours up today from either Amazon or Sonos’ own website.
Buy the Sonos OneBuy the Sonos One (Sonos.com)