Meet your new competition in smart speakers, Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple HomePod.
The new Sonos One is here and making quite a noise in the tech community this week.
At an event in New York City Wednesday, Sonos announced the new gadget will incorporate all of the major digital voice assistants. Amazon Alexa will be available immediately and both Google Assistant and Siri via iOS will be incorporated in 2018. The just released Sonos One resembles Sonos Play 1, but has six built-in microphones to allow it to respond to voice commands, Sonos representatives told CNET Wednesday.
“This kind of multiplatform support for virtual assistants is a first among smart speakers, and could potentially fulfill Sonos’ promise of being ‘the only smart speaker you’ll ever need,’” CNET reported.
At launch, the One can control Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeart Radio directly, Spotify will be added to the list soon. Available in black and white, the speaker has a microphone control on top as well as a touch-sensitive panel borrowed from, the Playbase which enables users to alter the volume, play/pause or skip tracks.
With its sleek technology and multiplatform capibility, Sonos is facing competition from traditional audience companies with multiroom systems such as DTS Play-Fi, Bose SoundTouch and Yamaha MusicCast.
Its biggest competitors are Amazon's newly added whole room Echo speakers, Google's inexpensive, multiroom speakers Chromecast Audio system, and by December, Apple's Siri-powered HomePod.
The Sonos One, priced at $199, is billed as a must-first speaker and is similar to Sonos’ Play:1.
The Sonos One is available for preorder now and will ship Oct. 24. Australian pricing and availability was not announced, but the UK price converts to about AU$335.
