Google is suing Sonos, claiming its new voice assistant infringes on seven patents related to its own Google Assistant technology, CNET reported. It’s the latest salvo in a long-running smart speaker battle between the companies, with each suing and countering the other after a period of working together.
“[Sonos has] launched an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products at the expense of our shared customers,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Sonos’ voice-controlled assistant arrived in June, allowing users to issue commands with the phrase “Hey Sonos,” similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant. In the complaint, Google said it has “worked for years with Sonos engineers to implement voice recognition and control of voice-activated devices in Sonos products … even providing its Google Assistant software to Sonos for many years.”
The fight erupted in early 2020 when Sonos sued Google for alleged patent infringement after the companies had collaborated for several years. Sonos claims that Google gained knowledge of their technology when they worked together and used that information to develop their own line of smart speakers. The company filed another lawsuit in September 2020, alleging that Google infringed five more patents.
Google countersued, alleging that Sonos was using Google’s search, software, network, audio processing and other technologies without paying a license fee and making “false claims” about how they work together
In 2021, the US International Trade Commission ruled that Google had infringed five of Sonos’ patents. This forced Google to change the way its speakers were set up to avoid the import ban. Most of these had to do with the way speaker groups are controlled – for example, users can no longer change the volume of a group of speakers and instead have to adjust them individually.
“Previously, Google sued us all over the world and Sonos prevailed in every single case,” Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus told CNET. “[The latest lawsuits] are scare tactics designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google’s monopolistic practices.”
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