Google has sued Sonos, alleging that its new voice assistant infringes on seven patents related to its own Google Assistant technology, CNET has reported. It’s the latest salvo in a long-running smart speaker battle between the companies, with one suing and countersuing the other after a period of working together.
“[Sonos has] launched an aggressive and deceptive 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,” much like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant. In the complaint, Google said it “worked for years with Sonos engineers to implement voice recognition and control of voice-activated devices in Sonos products … including providing its Google Assistant software to Sonos for many years”.
The feud erupted in early 2020 when Sonos sued Google for alleged patent infringement after the companies had collaborated for several years. Sonos claimed that Google gained knowledge of its technology when they worked together and used that information to develop its own line of smart speakers. The company filed another lawsuit in September 2020, alleging that Google infringed five more patents.
Google countered, alleging that Sonos used Google’s search, software, networking, audio processing and other technologies without paying a license fee and made “false claims” about their joint work.
In 2021, the US International Trade Commission ruled that Google infringed five Sonos patents. This forced Google to change the way their speakers were configured to avoid an import ban. Most of them were related to the way speaker groups are controlled; for example, users can no longer change the volume of a group of speakers and must adjust them individually.
“Google has previously sued us around the world, and Sonos has prevailed in every case decided,” Eddie Lazarus, Sonos’ chief legal officer, told CNET. “[The latest lawsuits] are an intimidation tactic designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google’s monopolistic practices.”
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