Proving that what other more ambitious voice assistants were claiming - to be able to quickly expand to other languages - is neither simple or fast to do, Sonos has now announced it's second major language support. Six months after the launch of Voice Control in English, and following three years of intense development efforts, key company acquisitions and having a development team that happens to be in Paris and is fluent in French. Solving challenges of speech understanding, including speech enhancement, wake word detection, automatic speech recognition, and natural language understanding, requires persistence and investment.
"One of the most natural and effortless ways to connect to your music is with your voice, but we knew from listening to our customers that privacy concerns meant many were choosing not to use voice control," says Joseph Dureau, Vice President, Voice Experience, Sonos. "We created Sonos Voice Control purely for listening on Sonos, putting privacy at its core. Since launching in the US, we have seen customers listening to 30% more music than before. We are energized by this progress and look forward to expanding to new people and places starting today in France."
Sonos Voice Control works on every voice-capable Sonos speaker, processing requests entirely on the device. No audio or transcript is sent to the cloud, stored, listened to or read by anyone. The feature is available on new voice capable products and as a free update for existing users. Sonos Voice Control commands will result for music playing in Sonos Radio, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Deezer.
Sonos Voice Control finds the music that users want to listen to, processing requests entirely on the device. Local processing delivers faster response times, and effortless follow-ups. All the users need is one “Hey Sonos” (same for French users but with accent) and to follow up without the need for additional wake-words. The names of artists, songs and albums or playlists should remain the same, but users in France can say "Joue Billie Eilish Bad Guy" with French accent.
Just like with the Sonos app, users can control music and speakers in any room, easily move music around the home, save and like their favorite songs to a personal music library and more. Sonos Voice Control understands the nuance of human communication and responds to natural commands like “turn it up!” in the US and “Monte le volume” in France. The French voice assistant that responds to commands to validate actions, when needed, was carefully created by Sonos to be "natural, unobtrusive, yet confident and engaging."
Sonos also confirms that the French Voice Control will be joined by others over time as Sonos continues to expand the experience to new countries and new languages.
www.sonos.com
