Amazon has just given Amazon Alexa a big upgrade, it now boasts a multi-room audio feature. Allowing users to play synchronised music across all your Amazon Echo devices.
PS. We recommend buying your Echo devices directly on Amazon, currently starting from under £50.
Toni Reid, Vice President, Amazon Alexa said
“Today, we’re making Alexa even smarter with an all-new feature that lets you play music synchronised on multiple Echo devices to provide room-filling music throughout your home.”
To use the feature users group more than one Echo device naming it, for example ‘downstairs’ or ‘kitchen’. They can they ask Alexa to play music across the group or different music in different rooms.
The feature is live now on Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Show in UK, Germany and USA. This must be Amazon’s largest smart home markets.
Amazon didn’t stop there, they also announced a set of tools to allow integration to Amazon Alexa Multi-Room Music.
Alexa Voice Service (AVS)
Multi-Room Music SDK
This allows users to play their music across Amazon Echo and their own supported speaker.
For example if you own two Amazon Echo devices and two AVS enabled speakers they can all play together and controlled via Alexa. Exactly which speakers will be AVS enabled is yet to be announced. This feature will be released early 2018.
This space is moving very quickly!
Just yesterday a new voice supported Sonos was leaked, followed by a Press Invite featuring lips, a big hint. Now Amazon make this release.
The very positive thing about this release is the collaboration and tools, a refreshing approach when compared to a lot of the big competitors.
Despite the collaboration if we were Sonos we would be pretty worried as unlike never before users can kit out their smart home with multi-room audio for less than £50 a room! The quality of the audio and power of course differ greatly however price point is always a very big factor, especially if purchasing multiple units for the entire house.
PS. We recommend buying your Echo devices directly on Amazon, currently starting from under £50.