The Sonos One is a safe first step towards the company’s voice assistant future

Scheduling a product event on the very same day as Google might not have been the wisest

move on the part of Sonos, as yesterday’s brand new Sonos One speaker quickly took a backseat to Pixel gadgets. But the device still marks a big moment for Sonos. After more than a year of talking about the importance and convenience of voice control, the company finally delivered a new product based around it — even if from the outside it looks (and sounds) identical to the Play:1. For the nitpicky among us, the Sonos One does have one minor aesthetic improvement over that model; the black version is all black, whereas the Play:1 had a gray speaker grille. But inside, Sonos has added six far-field microphones that allow you to use Amazon’s Alexa and eventually Google Assistant. There will be some unfortunate limitations out of the box at least for a few weeks. You can’t start playing music with Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal using voice. (Spotify is likely to resolve that quickly, but the others might just not happen.) I don’t personally view that as a deal breaker, as you can still play music from any and all of those services with the Sonos app. And once music is on, basic voice commands like pause, skip track, and volume should work fine. Sonos built that microphone setup with privacy in mind, hardwiring the mics to an LED at the top of the speaker that illuminates when an assistant is actively listening to you. There’s also a mute button if you want to disable Alexa altogether for a period of time. Thankfully these controls have been integrated seamlessly with the usual Sonos interface for controlling the music. The One has the same touch-sensitive buttons as the Play:5 and Playbase. At least for now, it seems Sonos has integrated voice without any tradeoffs versus the Play:1. Sonos realized that more and more people are playing music with an Echo or Google Home not because they sound great, but because doing so is so simple. So Sonos created the obvious first product to fend them off.                                                                           https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/5/16428964/sonos-one-speaker-voice-alexa-hands-on