Often overlooked when talking about the smart speaker race is Sonos, a company that continues to make its line of Hi-Fi speakers smarter by implementing integrations with the world's most popular voice assistants.
Alexa currently works on a number of more recent speakers from Sonos, and soon, Google Assistant will be on there, as well.
With the rollout of AirPlay 2, Sonos is also teasing Siri support, but it likely won't be a direct integration. What Sonos means by Siri support is being able to use Siri on an iPhone or iPad to control playback on the speaker — which is a typical feature of AirPlay 2. That's a far cry from full, unabridged Siri implementation. There's a chance it could happen, though.
Sonos Is Talking To Apple About Siri
That is if Apple is willing to let it. In a just-published interview between The Verge and Sonos CEO Patrick Spence, he reveals that Sonos has already approached Apple about bringing more sophisticated Siri integrations to its products.
"I think, at this point, Apple needs to decide if they're going to be opening Siri to third parties, but we have a good relationship with Apple, and we've had some conversations on this and look forward to having more."
Most likely, Apple won't budge, especially given that it already has its own speaker, the HomePod, which, while reportedly underperforming, will get a new version soon — one that's more affordable than the current model's $349 tag price. By Spence's account, Sonos has a good relationship with Apple, and it seems discussions between the two companies are going well enough to the point where he isn't ruling out full Siri support on Sonos speakers entirely. At least not yet.
Google Assistant And Dolby Atmos
Spence also shared quite a bit about other aspects of Sonos speakers, such as when Assistant is coming to the devices. He said 2018 remains to be the target rollout date on the Sonos One and Beam, its $400 Alexa-enabled soundbar.
As for Dolby Atmos support on Sonos devices, customers shouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon. Spence said there's no obvious benefit to bringing something like Dolby Atmos to the soundbar form factor that the company has largely focused on. There's "still work to be done" before Sonos sees a need to bring Dolby Atmos to its devices, according to Spence.
The full interview can be found on The Verge.
