The Sonos team has been hard at work with our partners at Google to bring you yet another easy way to control your Sonos system: the Google Assistant. Google’s remarkably smart voice assistant will let you do all kinds of things on Sonos; playing music with your voice is just the beginning of what’s possible.

While we originally planned to have the experience ready to ship in 2018, the reality is that we need a bit more time to get the experience right and will now look to lock down a date in 2019, and we’re continuing to make good progress.

If you’re interested in helping us kick the tires — and willing to put in the time and effort — you can sign up to be considered for the private beta here. We ask that beta testers commit to at least 14 hours of listening per week, use 10 voice commands daily, and respond to surveys within 72 hours.

Once we screen all the applicants — a process that will take a few weeks — our next step will be to start testing the experience in a few hundred homes at first, and a few thousand homes in the coming months. Our intent is to get important feedback from listeners in the real world before we launch.

We’re very excited to see Google Assistant come to life on Sonos, and we know our customers are too. Indeed, it’s easily one of the questions we get the most from customers, press, and even in the comments on our Instagram feed: When is Google Assistant coming to Sonos? We’re listening. Together with Google, we’ve learned a lot, and are confident the integration will be worth the wait.

Stay tuned. We look forward to sharing another update in early 2019!