The Sonos One and Sonos Beam are two speakers from the popular speaker maker that support Amazon Alexa. However, as with every other third-party Alexa speaker out there, you do need to set up the speaker through its own app – the Sonos app. And it can be a bit difficult to setup Alexa for the Sonos One or the Sonos Beam. We’re going to walk you through how to do it, and also a quick run down of what Sonos One and Beam can do with Alexa’s voice commands.
How To Setup A Sonos One Or Beam
Getting started, you’re going to want to download the Sonos app from the Google Play Store.
If you don’t have any other Sonos products (meaning you’ve never set one up before), you’re going to need to create a Sonos account.
If you are a first time Sonos user, it will take you directly into the setup process, where you will need to choose the speaker you want to set up. Otherwise, go to More on the right side of the app. Then tap on Add Speakers.
The Sonos app will walk you through setting up the speaker from there. Which includes plugging it in, making sure the light is flashing white, etc. It’s pretty simple and Sonos even provides some troubleshooting in case things aren’t working as they should be.
You’ll repeat this process for each speaker you want to setup. Since Sonos does offer a few different speakers, you may want to pick up some others. Like the Sonos SUB or another One for surround sound in your entertainment center.
How To Setup Amazon Alexa on Sonos One or Beam
In the setup process, it should ask you to setup Alexa. But if it doesn’t, this is how you would go about doing that.
You’ll again head to that More tab on the Sonos app. Then tap on Voice Services. It will show you the voice services that are available for the Sonos products you have. For now, it will only show Amazon Alexa, but in the future, Google Assistant will also be available.
Tap on Amazon Alexa, from there it will ask you to go to Amazon to sign into your account and link Sonos to your account.
Once you’ve given it access to your account, that’s about it for setting up Alexa on your Sonos One or Beam. Now you can ask Alexa to do all sorts of things, including playing music.
Using Alexa On other Sonos Products
Alexa is built into the Sonos One and Beam, but it is still compatible with older Sonos products. Like the PLAY:1, PLAY:3, PLAY:5, and others. This is through the Alexa skill that you can download and install on your devices. It’s worth noting that you will need an Echo or another Alexa device – perhaps a Sonos One – to actually use this.
With the Alexa Skill, you can talk to your Alexa speaker, like a Sonos One, and tell it to play music on your speaker. However, you will need to link that music service to Alexa and also link to it in the Sonos app. So that both parties have access to your service.
It’s a pretty rough way of using Alexa with older Sonos products. So if you haven’t already bought any Sonos speakers and want to use Amazon Alexa, you’ll want to splurge for the Sonos One or Sonos Beam depending on what you want the speaker for. These are a bit more (the Beam is actually about $300 less than the PLAYBAR and PLAYBASE), but worth it for seamless Amazon Alexa support.
Amazon Alexa Commands on Sonos
With the Sonos One or Sonos Beam, you are basically getting a better sounding Echo smart speaker. Anything you can do with Alexa on an Echo, you can also do with the Sonos One – with a couple of exceptions. This means you can ask Alexa for the weather, you can ask Alexa to play music, and so much more.
For other Sonos speakers, you won’t be able to do everything that an Echo can do. In fact, there’s a lot less you can do. It can basically only do music.
Some of the commands that Sonos and Alexa can do include:
“Alexa, pause/stop/resume (in the room name)”
“Alexa, skip/next song (in the room name)”
“Alexa, play the next/previous song/track (in the room name)”
“Alexa, play my (playlist name) playlist (in the room name)”
“Alexa, resume on (room name)”
“Alexa, previous/next song/track”
“Alexa, what’s playing in (room name)?”
There are many more that can be said too, especially for Sonos One and Beam, but for all Sonos speakers, these will work.
Wrap Up
If you want to get Alexa into your home, but also want some good sounding audio, then you are going to want to take a look at the Sonos One or the Sonos Beam, depending on where you want to put a speaker. These both sound much, much better than an Amazon Echo, and also provide WiFi playback instead of Bluetooth, for better sounding audio, thanks to the increase in bandwidth.