Renowned American consumer electronics company, Sonos has launched a smart speaker incorporated with the voice services of Google assistant and Amazon Alexa. Reportedly, it is the first device to pull together different digital assistants of various companies.
With the incorporation of Alexa with Sonos One, users can set timers while simultaneously listening to sport, weather and traffic updates. This move to add several voice assistants to the smart speaker is likely to enhance the adoption rate of smart home products, which would certainly provide a boost to smart speaker market.
The software and hardware components in Sonos One have been combined very smartly to automatically tune sound as per the surrounding environment. The product apparently has two D-Class digital amplifiers, one mid-woofer and one tweeter. It needs to be remembered though, that the functionality of the smart speaker can only be available in presence of the Amazon streaming facility.
Sonos One has been designed with customized noise suppression systems to avoid the background noises. In addition, a six-microphone array has also been incorporated in the voice recognition system to maintain voice quality. Sonos One also offers many other benefits such as user-friendly access for changing the volume, pausing music, and skipping a song through merely voice control. Moreover, it can be used to play podcasts, music, audiobooks, and other content from more than eighty streaming services on a single platform.
One of the biggest challenges that lies ahead for smart home industry players is the ‘one system for one device’ concept, given that currently, some devices are only compatible with parent device. For instance, in Amazon Echo, for turning off the light, users have to switch to the Siri framework. Accordingly, the R&D team at Sonos has been looking forward to upgrading the existing devices so as to make them compatible with Alexa.