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Amazon’s Alexa now lets you control music in multiple rooms

@kharijohnson
Image Credit: Shutterstock.com/Peppinuzzo

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Amazon announced today that it’s rolling out the ability to sync music between multiple devices — like the Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show. The new Multi-Room Music feature can either sync music across multiple devices or specify where you want to play music, so you can say, “Alexa, play Donny Hathaway upstairs” or “Alexa, play The Fugees in the living room.” Multi-Room Music launches with services like Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora. Support for Spotify and SiriusXM are due out soon.

Amazon also announced today in a blog post the release of two new services to make it easier for music lovers to create multi-room experiences with Alexa-enabled devices.

The Connected Speakers API will make it possible for brands like Sonos, Bose, and Samsung to connect with Alexa Voice Service (AVS) and themselves play music in multiple rooms. The Connected Speakers API is available today in developer preview and is for brands that already have their own protocols for controlling speakers in multiple rooms. For devices that haven’t developed their own way to do this, Amazon has also rolled out the Multi-Room Music software development kit (SDK).

The AVS Multi-Room Music SDK allows the makers of third-party devices with Alexa inside to synchronize music with their own devices and multiple Amazon Echo devices.

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Both the AVS Multi-Room SDK and Connected Speakers API are available starting today in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany.

Despite more than 15,000 skills, flash briefings, and other services, music remains one of the primary use cases for smart speakers. A survey of the smart speaker owners by VoiceLabs last year found that 45 percent use the device to play music or books, more than for any other purpose.