Sonos is considering introducing its own virtual assistant in future smart speakers

A Sonos customer on Reddit shared a survey in which the company touts "Sonos Voice Control," which offers "quick, easy, private control designed by Sonos for Sonos"

The assistant, which is somewhat unimaginative, activating with the phrase "Hey Sonos," would take care of the usual music-related tasks that Alexa and Google Assistants do It plays songs on demand, adjusts volume, skips songs, pauses playback, and passes music from speaker to speaker

Sonos explains that all commands will be processed locally; Sonos promises "faster response times" and that "audio will not be sent to the cloud, stored, transcribed, or heard by anyone"

This is very similar to the technology Sonos acquired when it acquired Snips in 2019 for approximately $375 million In a press release announcing the move, Sonos described Snips as "an AI voice platform for connected devices that offers private-by-design voice technology," and CEO Patrick Spence said that going forward it will help "create an even more differentiated and immersive experience for our customers that will help to 'create an even more differentiated and immersive experience for customers' in the future"

While the focus on privacy may sound like a targeted attack on its rivals,

interestingly, Sonos is not pitching its voice assistant as a replacement for Alexa or Google Assistant, which are already part of current speakers It is not marketing it as such Rather, he suggests that the assistants coexist

"Use Sonos Voice Control and Amazon Alexa on the same speaker It continues, "Just have Sonos play a song and Alexa look up the weather," indicating that Sonos' involvement will be limited to musical matters

The survey specifically mentions Alexa only, which may be for brevity, but the omission of Google Assistant may be a sign of things to come Google's virtual assistant has been introduced in some Sonos products, but Sonos sued Google for patent infringement in 2020, and a judge just ruled in Sonos' favor Therefore, it is possible that this is the end of the cooperation between the two companies

After pitching its product, Sonos asks customers to give their verdict, choosing how interested they are on a seven-point scale from "not very interested" to "very interested"

When The Verge asked about the survey, Sonos was typically uncooperative 'We regularly put product and experience concepts in front of our customers to better understand what is important to them,' he said At this point, we have nothing further to share with you"

How you read this is up to you, but given both the Snips acquisition and the very detailed description of the technology, it seems likely that this is something we will hear more about soon, unless the survey draws overwhelmingly negative responses