Sonos just gave Spotify users a great free upgrade

Carrie Marshall
·2 min read
Sonos Era 100 promotional image.
Sonos Era 100 promotional image.

Good news for Sonos speaker owners with Spotify subs: Sonos's voice control software has been updated to provide some useful Spotify integration.

Voice Control can do more than just skip tracks or adjust the volume, although of course it can do that too. You can tell it to play music in particular rooms, to add songs to particular playlists, to group and ungroup rooms and more. And it works with portable speakers too, so you can use it while playing songs from your backpack.

Spotify isn't the only service with Voice Control support: it also works with Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer and Pandora. But Spotify's bigger user base means its support is a bigger deal.

What Sonos speakers work with Voice Control?

As you'd expect, in order to use Voice Control with your Sonos kit you need to have a speaker with a microphone in it. In terms of the current range that means the Era 300, the Era 100, the Move 2, the Sonos Roam, the Sonos One but not the One SL, the Arc soundbar and both generations of the Sonos Beam soundbar.

To use Voice Control it's just a matter of using the "hey Sonos" trigger phrase and then telling your speaker what you want to do: play Taylor Swift, add this song to your dinner party playlist, group the dining room and living and so on. You only need to use the trigger phrase once to get your speaker's attention; you can then ask it to do multiple things without having to repeat the phrase every time. With the Arc and Beam soundbars you can also use voice commands to turn on the TV and adjust your home cinema settings.

Sonos, like Apple, is keen to point out that your voice isn't being uploaded to the cloud where shenanigans and tomfoolery may occur: all of your voice requests are processed locally on the device and then deleted when they've been understood and acted upon. That's reassuring, because of course the concern with smart speakers isn't that someone's listening in to your playlist choices but that the speaker might be hearing and uploading other audio too.