It’s now official: Sonos has unveiled its own smart assistant with the not too exciting name ‘Voice Control’.
We wrote about it recently: the rumors about a smart assistant from Sonos. Well, the company has now officially announced it. It also became immediately clear that it is not (yet?) a ‘real’ smart assistant a la Google Assistant or Alexa. All voice commands from Sonos Voice Control (as the service is called) are primarily for controlling the Sonos devices themselves. And – very interestingly – everything is processed on-device. So there’s no cloud communication with back-end servers processing the requests. And no listening-in ‘quality control’ either. This makes the number of commands relatively limited, but the idea is that you can easily use it, for example, to play hands-free music. Sadly enough, we don’t need to get excited here in Europe yet. The feature will be rolled out in the US on June 1, France will follow ‘later this year’ and the rest ‘someday’.