Google home speakers are about to get slightly worse because Sonos sued and won

This comment thread is very quickly going to become a discussion about software patents in general, however in this case it worth also looking at the history of the case. My understanding is that Google partnered with Sonos back in 2013 to bring Google Play to Sonos speakers, during that partnership Google basically milked Sonos for info on how their platform worked in order to compete with them.<p>I suspect that the outcome of this where Google devices have to have volume controlled individually isn&#x27;t due to a patent on that specific functionality, but due to something with the inter-speaker communication system that Sonos pioneered (multiple wireless speakers playing sound in sync with each other, with no audible delay). Google will have had to change how they have speakers talk to each other and the <i>side effect</i> is the lack of group volume control.<p>A patent on &quot;speaker group volume control&quot; I agree would be silly, but a parent on a wireless control system and protocol for multiple speakers that can be grouped together is far less so.

&gt; Google home speakers are about to get slightly worse<p>Google are well ahead of this lawsuit, the home speakers have been getting slightly worse since Google lost interest and moved on a couple of years ago.<p>Say what you will about Alexa, but it is the only voice assistant that seemingly keeps improving, Siri is statically-terrible and while Google Assistant was once good, it is worse now than then somehow (although functionality&#x2F;integrations hasn&#x27;t evolved).<p>My favorite thing right now is that a room can have multiple devices (e.g. screens, speakers, etc) but timers don&#x27;t belong to a room, they belong to an individual Home device, so your screens don&#x27;t show your timers if your speaker &quot;eats&quot; them. Makes zero sense. Been like that for over a year.<p>In general Google as an organization is going downhill fast. Google Search is legitimately bad now, I turn on Verbatim Mode and quote everything just to get a so-so experience (still mostly spam though).

I was mentally preparing myself to agree with Sonos on something, but apparently the patent in question is for being able to adjust the volume on a group of speakers instead of having to adjust each speaker individually. It seems ridiculous that this is patentable at all. It seems like the sort of usability feature that would take five minutes to design and perhaps get implemented before lunch. Am I missing something here?

Ah, yes. The non-obvious ability for a volume control to control more than one speaker at a time.<p>Our patent system is so broken.

One more reason to never buy a product requiring persistent internet connectivity with automatic updates. When physical products are treated the same as software as a service, you don&#x27;t own a damn thing.

I love the person telling people to use Home Assistant to replace this functionality.<p>I use Home Assistant a lot and I basically had to learn yet another shitty programming language implemented in yaml.

Software and interactions should not be patentable.

Will Google take it to the Supreme Court as they did with the Oracle vs. Google case over the Java API?

you gotta be out of your mind to bug your own house with these devices

I feel like the title is misleading. The speakers are getting worse because Google is too greedy to pay for the patent that they have been using without paying until now.<p>Whether that patent is useful is a different question, but the headline makes it sound like Sonos is the aggressor here. But Google chose to do things this way, and Sonos then reacted.

What am I doing with my life working for pay? I should patent some one to many interactions and become a patent troll.

Anyone looking to work around this by building their own multi-room speaker system should take a look at snapcast<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;badaix&#x2F;snapcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;badaix&#x2F;snapcast</a>

This article title is mis-leading. More like:<p>&quot;Google Home speakers are about to get slightly worse because Google infringed on existing patents and was caught.&quot;

Reminder that we can&#x27;t have Alexa and Google Assistant operating simultaneously on Sonos speakers only because Google won&#x27;t allow it.

Did Apple license Sonos patents for multi-room HomePod audio?