Can anyone in the Alexa Beta SDK comment on its capabilities to play music/audio? I’m thinking it’d be awesome if someone could build an easy app that takes API calls and plays audio files on the Echo. This would allow us to build SmartApps that can turn the Echo into a Sonos-like device. Thoughts?
Ule’s already discussed this briefly in the DLNA topic.
First, though, it’s important to know that Sonos’ big differentiator from the beginning has been its synchronization of play across multiple speakers. You can either play the same thing on multiple Sonos units at once, or have music follow you around the house.
Echo very notably lacks this. People who have more than one often mention this lack.
So Echo as a bluetooth speaker, yes. But not so much a “Sonos alternative.” Of course that’s true of most of the other bluetooth speakers also. 
I’m merely bringing it up as a possibility for those that have Echo for all its other connected glory (and future glory) but don’t want to drop $300+ for another set of speakers alongside it to get playback queued from ST.
My primary use would be to have an Echo near my bathroom/bedroom and have ST auto-play radio in the morning when I get ready. Sure I could just ask Echo to do it every day, but what’s the fun in that?!
Yep. There are no options to stream media to the Echo device in the beta sdk. The ASK (cute name for the SDK now) doesn’t seem to add them either. Pretty much all you get is the ability to map phrases to intents (with specific bits passed into the app) and return text to say back, and info to put on the card in the Echo app. Plus whatever you want to do for the intent that is app specific.
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