Sonos promises to have Spotify and Alexa voice commands working by December 21st

Sonos has offered up a firm date by which users will be able to play Spotify with Alexa voice commands on their Sonos speakers: it’s December 21st. The company posted the deadline on its support forums. Currently, neither the new Sonos One (with built-in Alexa mics) or even a Sonos speaker paired together with an Amazon Echo Dot are able to start playing music from Spotify with voice.

Alexa is able to pause, skip tracks, and adjust volume for anything that’s playing on a connected Sonos system, so at the moment you can launch music from either the Sonos app or Spotify’s own app and then switch to voice commands for the absolute basics. But being able to tell Alexa (or the Sonos One) to play your Spotify playlists or a particular artist, album, or song on your nice Sonos gear from across the room will be far more convenient.

As it stands now, Alexa on Sonos can play music on command from Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn Radio, and SiriusXM. Adding Spotify will check off an essential box, but there’s no telling if or when other popular services like Apple Music will be supported.

It’s frankly a little confusing that Alexa can play music from Spotify on Amazon’s own devices but not those from other companies. Ultimate Ears is facing the same dilemma with its new UE Blast speakers, which also have integrated mics for talking to Amazon’s Alexa assistant and playing music — but Spotify isn’t among the supported music services.