Amazon Echo speakers now support multi-room music playback

If you own more than one of Amazon’s Echo speakers, you can now sync them up so they are playing the same song in multiple rooms. This new feature is rolling out today for owners of the Echo, the Echo Dot, and the recently launched Echo Show. If you have an Echo speaker, just access the Alexa App to group together two or more Echo speakers, then name the grouping. Once that’s done, ask Alexa to play a song with the speaker group’s name, and it will start playing across all those devices.

At the moment, the multi-room music feature is available for playing songs via Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora, but support is coming soon for Spotify and SiriusXM. The new feature is currently limited to US, UK, and German residents. In the future, Amazon plans to extend this feature to support other non-Echo connected speakers. This will be through the use of newly released Connected Speaker APIs from Amazon. The company has confirmed it plans to work with Sonos, Bose, Sound United, and Samsung to enable these APIs to work on their speaker products.

The company also announced plans to release its Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Multi-Room Music SDK. These developer tools will allow device makers to integrate their products with Amazon Alexa Multi-Room Music so that any Echo and AVS device can play music at the same time. The tools will be released sometime in early 2018.