GE Teams With Sonos To Let Your Smart Appliances Talk Back

If you're a Sonos user with a kitchen full of GE smart appliances, then you've got some new integration heading your way. GE Appliances announced today that it's launching compatibility with Sonos speakers for many of its smart home products. This team-up will start somewhat small and expand from here, with GE boasting that it's the first appliance company to join forces with Sonos.

As you might imagine, this integration is all about getting notifications from your smart appliances on your Sonos speakers. At first, GE says that the team-up will be limited to just "GEA branded ovens, cooktops and refrigerators." Eventually, however, we'll see Sonos compatibility spread throughout GE's entire lineup of smart appliances.

So, a future where you'll get notifications from your dishwater about the cleaning cycle that just finished isn't too far off. GE also says that your oven will be able to do things like tell you when preheating is finished, which actually seems to be particularly useful for those of us who have a habit of letting the oven preheat for the better part of an hour because we live in a world full of distractions.

In the end, the idea is to make it so you can be constantly monitoring your array of appliances without the need to be physically present at all times. Integration will be carried out through GE's SmartHQ app, though for the moment, the company hasn't provided a timeline for when it expects its entire smart appliance portfolio to be compatible with Sonos speakers.

This could potentially be a big win for Sonos as it tries to compete with the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple for smart home dominance. As something of a platform-agnostic alternative to the smart speakers from those three companies, integration like this could make speakers from Sonos more attractive to those who are looking to pad out their smart home arsenal. We'll see if GE and Sonos announce more about this team-up in the future, so stay tuned.