American audio equipment maker Sonos is said to be developing its own voice assistant that will come as an alternative to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. The Sonos virtual assistant will work with the company’s speakers, and is said to not use the cloud for routing questions and commands. Reports about a Sonos virtual assistant stem from a customer survey that was first spotted by a website called VoiceBot.ai. In the survey, Sonos describes an on-device control system that would improve user privacy by not routing questions and commands via the cloud.
The company also says that its potential new product offering will use the word “Hey Sonos” and let users control playback, search through songs, and move music to other speakers with their voice. The Sonos survey claims that the assistant will be able to respond faster because it would be processing everything on the device itself, rather tha sending it to a server via the Internet. Sonos, in a response to the survey, told The Verge that it does not have anything to share apart from the survey itself.
Reports of Sonos coming up with its own virtual assistant may be true as the company had, back in 2019, acquired AI voice platform called Snips, which is known for its privacy-focused tech – doing all processing on the device. This sounds a lot like the “potential” product offering that Sonos talks about in the recently found survey.
The American audio equipment maker has been in a legal battle against Google since the past couple of years. Recently, a US Judge gave a ruling in favour of Sonos, where it was ruled that Google infringed at least five patents from Sonos that relate to smart speaker technology.
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