Snips beibg acquired by Sonos is not the worst outcome, glad Sonos has a strategy to add their own smart assistant to their speakers rather than being beholden to large players.

I'm doubtful that Sonos will continue to maintain all the open source projects from Snips [1]. Sonos doesn't even appear to have a public GitHub presence. They'll most likely abandon those projects and integrate the software in their devices.

[1] https://github.com/snipsco

Well, somehow I missed this and it's really disappointing. I liked Sonos' products until they had to add in smart speaker functionality. I won't buy their speakers that have a microphone and hopefully more people continually let them know that as well. At a minimum Sonos should offer a physical on/off switch to electrically disconnect any microphone. I don't trust any product in this space not to eventually do the wrong thing and collect more data than they've claimed to limit themselves to. The Sonos products seem to be changing for the worse. I think it's inevitable they're getting to the point where you won't be able to use their products unless they have a valid logged in account. It's truly frustrating all of these products that can operate without Internet phone home check-ins, yet people complacently buy them and agree to ridiculous ToS. Another one down, I guess.

Sonos recently introduced the One SL speaker, which seems similar to the Sonos One but without Alexa.

Yes, that was a great move, it's basically what the One used to be prior to them adding the mic. While they haven't done it yet I hope they don't drop the mic-less larger models. We'll see, from what I know Sonos has a very healthy margin (most speaker companies do) and the need to monetize user data would be viewed by many as over the top.