Sonos to Make APIs Available to Third-Party Integrators as It Eyes Voice Control Integration
BOSTON -- Sonos is making application programming interfaces available to third-party developers, the company said in a facility tour with us last week. “Times are changing and things are evolving,” said Benjamin Rappoport, hardware product manager. Layered on top of quality sound is smart home technology and the “new paradigm of ask and listen” made possible by voice engines including Alexa and Google Assistant, he said. Sonos maintains it’s still on track to deliver Google Assistant voice control by year-end.
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The company now refers to its integrator business as Installed Solutions, and it wraps in security dealers who increasingly want to include music in their portfolios, said Andrew Vloyanetes, head of sales, U.S. Installed Solutions. He cited the advent of companies like Alarm.com and other “integrator-friendly” security systems. Selling through professional security installers is another way to bring music to consumers, through integrations, he said.
Installed Solutions addresses major emerging trends: paid streaming, the rise of voice and smart home, said Zach Kramer, global head-retail and Commercial Installed Solutions. “That’s very confusing for a lot of consumers, and it’s actually the channel where they get the best explanation of how all this stuff works together and the simplest solutions.”
Sonos has been an open platform for a lot of partners, “but open in quotes,” said Lidiane Jones, vice president-software product management, saying the company worked with select partners to enable joint experiences. In September, the company is opening its developer program to address the rise of the smart home and voice interfaces, Jones said. “Hopefully, in a year we’re going to be discussing all of these interesting and innovative integrations that are coming out that we can’t even predict today.” Initially, the open platform will be about controlling a set of cloud-based control APIs for basic play, pause, and skip-type functions and making playlists available, she said.
Sonos dealer Matt Scott, president of Omega Audio Video, London, Ontario, sees the opening of the Sonos platform as an essential move in the connected world. Noting snafus in the past couple of years with established control systems losing their ability to talk to Sonos systems, Scott said it's “a big deal for installers” to know that the “major control manufacturers can develop systems that allow us to work with Sonos, allow us to get to playlists."
Sonos Notebook
CEO Patrick Spence extended the company’s mantra to “help people listen better” beyond music, echoing trends from content providers including Pandora and Spotify that have recently targeted podcasts as a next frontier for streaming audio. “Customers need to be able to get access to podcast, audio books, all of these things because it helps us fill more homes with music,” Spence said. Some 176 million people are listening to streaming music, expected to jump to 300 million by 2021, he said. Growth, combined with the rise in voice control and smart home, are powering what Sonos calls “the sonic internet,” he said. With consumers being able to “ask and listen,” the internet is becoming “audio-enabled,” he said.
Despite the delay in the rollout of Google Assistant in Sonos One and Beam speakers, Jones, vice president-software product management, said Sonos has a great partnership with Google and has a shared goal of delivering a great user experience. On whether issues between Google and Amazon are behind the slow rollout of Assistant on the Alexa-enabled Sonos One and Beam, Jones is “happy with the way things are progressing.” On challenges of integrating voice control from different providers, Jones compared that to integrating different music streaming services, which Sonos did on its platform. "We’ve always been an open ecosystem on the content side” and Sonos has had to wrestle with “how to bring simplicity to a complex world," and that's the approach it's taking with voice control, she said. Voice adds the challenge of “human cognitive behaviors,” Jones said. On whether Sonos will accommodate all digital assistants at some point, she said Sonos takes an open stance on voice control: “We want voice to be an open space for users as well.”