Sonos pre-released a new privacy policy today to existing customers, explaining upcoming changes and privacy protections.
The most interesting part?
Sonos essentially confirmed the near-term release of its long-awaited Amazon Echo integration, which will allow Sonos owners to control their music by voice. From the blog post:
"First, you’ll notice that we’ve added a section on what it means if you choose to enable a voice assistant to control your Sonos system when that becomes available in your country ... the most important thing for you to know is that Sonos does not keep recordings of your voice data. It goes to the voice assistant service (for example Amazon) that you’ve activated on your Sonos system."
Sonos pre-announced the Alexa integration almost a full year ago and released a private beta. But it has taken a very long time to finish and release, and the Sonos user community has been asking about it ever since.
The benefit of Sonos is high-quality multi-room music.
The benefit of Alexa (and Google Home, and Apple's Siri, with HomePod) is being able to control it from anywhere in your home just with your voice.
“Our Amazon customers love listening to music. With Echo and Alexa, we combined that love of music with the ease of hands-free voice control, and today, music is one of the most-used features on Alexa-enabled devices,” Mike George, a vice president at Amazon, said back in 2016. “We’re thrilled to collaborate with Sonos to combine the magic of Alexa with an incredible way to listen to music in every room in the home.”
“Our mission is to fill every home with music,” Sonos President Patrick Spence also said. “We don’t care what you listen to, how you get to it, or in what room – we just want it to be effortless, quick and epic. Alexa on Sonos will be all that, and fun too.”
It's a marriage made in heaven, perhaps, but the courtship has taken a very, very long time.
Now, at least, it seems that Sonos owners will not have much longer to wait.
