Sonos is giving some serious side-eye to Google's assertion that Assistant and Alexa can't play nicely
It's no secret that Sonos and Google aren't best friends right now. The companies are currently involved in severaldifferentlawsuits regarding intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, and it doesn't seem like the relationship will improve anytime soon. Sonos's Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus delivered remarks to the Senate Judiciary antitrust committee yesterday, calling for action on a lack of interoperability procedures preventing them from using multiple voice assistants at once.
Lazarus's statement to the Senate yesterday touched on, among other competition-focused issues, the inability to enable interoperability between smart home platforms. Essentially, Sonos wants its customers to actively use Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri as they wish, while the companies behind those services seek ecosystem lock-in. For its part, Google's senior public policy director Wilson White told committee members that interoperability is impossible due to "technical challenges" regarding privacy and security when two voice assistants are active simultaneously.