Google Assistant on Sonos delayed till 2019
Despite promising a 2018 release, Sonos says customers hoping for both Alexa and Assistant on their smart speakers will have to wait.
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Sonos has announced that Google Assistant won't be joining Amazon 's Alexa on its Sonos One and Beam speakers until 2019.
Sonos' smart speakers currently support Alexa and the support for multiple voice assistants, including Google's , was one of the main selling points of the Sonos One at its 2017 launch.
"While we originally planned to have the experience ready to ship in 2018," Sonos in a blog post on Thursday, "the reality is that we need a bit more time to get the experience right and will now look to lock down a date in 2019, and we're continuing to make good progress."
Sonos told CNET that it had to essentially build a new platform to enable Google Assistant to work with Sonos.
"We're building this deep integration from scratch, and we want it to be seamless," a Sonos representative said.
The company says Google Assistant support is one of the things its customers ask most about, and the company was still confident of a 2018 release at the launch of the Sonos Amp in August.
Instead, Sonos has announced a private beta which will occur in "a few hundred homes at first, and a few thousand homes in the coming months." The company says it will share another update about its progress in early 2019.
Sonos isn't the only company looking to integrate both Alexa and Google Assistant, with a Marshall representative confirming to CNET that it's also delaying Google integration in its smart speaker range until 2019.
Meanwhile, Sonos is in talks with Roku to add its Entertainment Assistant to its speakers, while Roku in turn just added Google Assistant support to its streaming devices.
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