Sonos One smart speaker with voice control announced

The same Trueplay tech found in other Sonos speakers is present here, too, which means it will automatically tune the sound to suit its environment. The Sonos One now runs on a chip that’s as capable as the one in your smartphone.

Amazon says it’s customized Alexa for the Indian market by adopting a new English voice which can accurately pronounce local words.

The gadget includes Amazon’s Alexa voice software for controlling music playback, Sonos said at the product’s event. The gadget can associate with and control smart home gadgets also, for example, the Nest indoor regulator. Also by 2018, Sonos said, it plans to integrate Google’s voice assistant.

Spec-wise, the new One looks to be in line with the Play:1 it replaces, save for the addition of touch controls and voice input mics.

Since Alexa for older Sonos systems is still in beta, and those speakers weren’t built for voice control as the new Sonos One is, it’s worth bearing in mind that things might not work perfectly.

Sonos, a small company dedicated to sound and multimedia that has been making waves recently, is the latest big player looking to get into the smart speaker game with their Sonos One smart speaker.

Comparing the Sonos One’s form factor to the Play:1 is obvious. If you were to send Sonos a musical query that demanded some metadata finesse such as, “Play me some music from artists influenced by Ella Fitzgerald”, it would have to rely on the smarts of one of the services it supports. Of course, like with other Sonos speakers, you will be able to pair the Sonos One with other Sonos Ones in stereo mode. All three are smart speakers with Amazon’s Alexa, a smart virtual assistant, powering them.

A £199 device from Sonos and two from Google – a cut-price mini-speaker for £49 and a high-end one at £399 – will go head to head with products from Apple and Amazon. Support for other platforms could be added in the future, as the market demands.

Being nearly a clone of the Play:1, the Sonos One can’t be paired with a Play:1 for left and right channel stereo setups.

Sonos has finally announced its own smart speaker that’s powered by Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant. It can be used to play music, check news, weather, set alarms and more. You’ll be able to treat the Sonos One like a Google Home and activate it by saying, “Hey Google”.

The announcement came just as Google introduced new smart speakers to the crowd in San Francisco waiting for the Pixel 2.

Designed from the ground up to deliver surprisingly rich sound from a speaker of its size. Echo Dot has a compact design and comes in either black or white colour options. Nowadays, the ability to ask simple queries of a voice-enabled speaker at home is the norm, and the threat was that Sonos would get left behind.