How Sonos and Amazon Echo Learned to Talk to Each Other

Matt Welch began hacking his Sonos internet-connected stereo system about two years ago, to make it easier for his wife to listen to the radio. One of his favorite creations was a software program that used the microphone on the family's Echo, Amazon's talking speaker, as a voice-control input for the Sonos. “Now she could walk into the room and say, ‘Sonos, play NPR,’” said Welch, a computer programmer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Building the program took him about a week.

Welch wasn’t the only Sonos fan spending time trying to connect Amazon’s and Sonos’s speakers. Guides for hacks began appearing online soon after the Echo debuted in late 2014. It wasn’t that hard to do for tinkerers who could discern sentences like this one: “Setup your server to auto-start or daemonize the node-sonos-http-api server.” Everyone else was out of luck.