Google and Sonos are headed again to court docket. After Google misplaced an earlier patent case over speaker quantity controls, Google is now suing Sonos over voice management expertise. Google confirmed the lawsuit to The Verge this morning, with the corporate saying it needs to “defend our expertise and problem Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents.” Google alleges infringement of seven patents associated to voice enter, together with hot-word detection and a system that determines which speaker in a bunch ought to reply to voice instructions.

Sonos has usually supported the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa for voice management, however Google and Amazon are additionally Sonos’s largest speaker opponents. So Sonos launched its personal voice assistant function in Could, opening it as much as this new pile of Google patents. (For now, Sonos helps all three choices.)

Google hardly ever makes use of patents offensively, however that is a part of a multi-lawsuit battle that has despatched the corporate’s sensible speaker line reeling after Google misplaced a earlier ruling in January. Reasonably than pay royalties to Sonos, Google determined to attain into clients’ houses and begin breaking gadgets that they had already purchased. Google stripped Nest Audio and Google House audio system of the flexibility to regulate quantity for a speaker group, turning what was an easy and commonsense activity into an ordeal requiring a display stuffed with particular person sliders. It is laborious to overstate how annoying that is for customers, as quantity management is a main perform of any speaker.

Sonos originated the linked speaker idea, but it surely has been dealing with competitors from Massive Tech giants lately. Sonos says it gave Google an inside have a look at its operations in 2013 whereas Sonos was asking for Google Play Music assist and that Google used that entry to “blatantly and knowingly copy” Sonos’s expertise. Google’s first sensible speaker launched three years later.