Sonos may be on the cusp of delivering its own digital assistant if a recent leak on Reddit is correct.
A few years ago, Sonos bought the privacy-focused digital assistant startup Snips. Since then, it’s been widely assumed that the company is working on its own digital assistant to playback music on its speakers. There have even been job listings at Sonos related to digital assistants.
Now, with this leak from Reddit, it appears that we’re getting our first real look at what the logo for the assistant might be. And surprisingly, it also shares the same shape as the text bubble within the Alexa logo. The leak also shows the Sonos assistant logo beside a Google Assistant icon, but it appears that it won’t work at the same time as that version.
The Verge speculates that these images mean that Alexa and the Sonos assistant can run concurrently, but not the Sonos assistant and Google Assistant. This aligns with prior reports claiming that Amazon was open to letting Sonos run both Alexa and Google Assistant at the same time on its speakers, but Google kiboshed the idea.
When it comes down to it, I’m not sure how I feel about Sonos having its own digital assistant. So far, I’ve found either Alexa or Google Assistant are able to cover most of my needs. There is an argument to be made that Sonos can keep all of the voice processing on-device for privacy reasons, but I’d expect most people won’t care.