But save all the visions of the future for another day. The road is long, requires years of work from companies larger than Sonos, and won't matter much to Sonos users anytime soon. Not to mention, the first test for Sonos and Amazon was hard enough: making Alexa amazing for music.

Play Me Something Good

Since Amazon launched the first Echo in 2014, people have used Alexa to play music. One 2017 study found music to be the most popular use of devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. (Another poll listed music second, only after setting timers.) "Music is integral to Alexa," says Rohit Prasad, Amazon's head scientist for Alexa. In a way, it exemplifies everything great about voice interfaces. You just ask for something, and Alexa finds it for you.

The voice-music connection was not lost on Sonos. In fact, it was becoming a problem. Even Sonos users—who love high-fi sound at least enough to spend serious coin on it—were starting to listen to music on smart speakers instead because they were so much easier to use. In 2014, Sonos had accounted for half the Wi-Fi speaker market, but Alexa quickly changed that; nobody sold more connected speakers in 2016 than Amazon. With Apple's HomePod coming out at the end of 2017, and new Echo products coming all the time, Sonos needed a way in.

Sonos could have built an Alexa skill to let you control volume, change songs, and hear everything through your Sonos speakers. You could even do that with a single cable: out of the Dot, into your Playbase, and ta-da! Voice-enabled Sonos setup.

But the company had bigger ambitions. It wanted to do away with the specific syntax and grammar associated with Amazon skills, so you wouldn't have to say "Alexa, turn up the volume on Sonos" or "play AC/DC on Sonos." It wanted to play music anywhere in your house, the way Sonos always has, and let users control their music from anywhere. It wanted the whole thing to feel sensible and natural and easy.

Unfortunately, music turns out to be a wildly complicated voice-control problem. You see P!nk and read "Pink," and understand "Sk8er Boi" as a phrase that makes sense, but a computer can't do that. If you want to play Sting, Alexa (or any other service) has to figure out which version of which song on which album on which music app you're looking for. Sometimes you don't know what a song is called, just that it's the one from Moana everyone's singing. "You have to choose, as Alexa, the best thing the customers want even when they're not very clear," says Prasad, Alexa's chief scientist. "Music humbles you, from a science perspective."

And so while Sonos improved its speakers, Amazon worked on making Alexa an even better DJ. It allowed for multi-room setups, so you can quickly move music around your house. Thanks to a feature called arbitration, which polls all the devices around you to determine which is the closest and best-suited to respond, you can even say "Alexa, play some music" and it will play wherever you are. This is good for Sonos, good for Alexa (Amazon recently rolled out its own multi-room audio system for owners of multiple Echos), and good for all other third-party devices.

The team is working toward a more natural way for users to interact with their assistant in general. The "Alexa, let me talk to…" grammar helped Amazon scale its third-party capabilities quickly, but hardly qualifies as a natural interaction. When you ask for how to say banana in Spanish, you shouldn't have to remember the name of a skill, or care which one you're using. You should just ask.

The One That Goes Doo Be Doo Do

A few weeks ago, I drove down the California coast to see the new Sonos One in action. A team of Sonos executives ushered me into one of the company's many listening rooms, a small, windowless space set up like the den from a West Elm ad. Inside, there were a preposterous number of Sonos speakers: a Playbase underneath a large TV, a Sub subwoofer against one wall, a surround-sound setup of various Play 1s and 3s. Alone on a coffee table in front of me sat a Sonos One in all black. Two more, in white, flanked the TV.