Sonos offline virtual assistant to work with its speakers, process data on device itself

American audio products manufacturer Sonos might be developing a voice assistant of its own. The voice assistant will be used instead of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. The virtual assistant will work with Sonos' speakers and is said to work offline. Reports about the virtual assistant by Sonos come from a customer survey that asks questions about an on-device voice-based control system that would not route questions or commands via the internet. 

Sonos is reportedly developing an original offline virtual assistant for its audio devices

Just like other voice assistants out there that respond to commands like Hey Google or Hello Alexa, the Sonos Virtual Assistant will respond to the command Hey Sonos. Using the assistant, users will be able to search through songs on their device, move music to other devices and play/pause music. The survey conducted by the company states that the Sonos Virtual assistant would be faster than other cloud-based assistants as it would process all the commands offline. This eliminates the time it takes to send the command to companies servers via the internet and then getting back a response, and eliminates that assistant's dependability on the internet. 

Sonos acquired an AI voice platform called Snips back in 2019 with similar characteristics 

Back in 2019, Sonos had also acquired an AI voice platform named Snips which has expertise in manufacturing tech that takes care of user privacy. Snips do so by preventing any data processing on the cloud and keeping information on the devices themselves. Sonos might integrate the expertise that Snips has and create the potential product that they have been talking about in the customer survey. 

The American audio equipment company Sonos has been battling Google for quite some time over the issue of patent infringement. It was recently when a United States judge ruled in favour of Sonos, declaring that Google infringed a minimum of five patents from Sonos that were about the smart speaker technology that Sonos was working on. Google also has a dedicated lineup of smart voice-controlled devices called Google Home. The lineup comes at different prices, with different audio output capabilities.