I may have to look up the patent myself
As my car, made in 2012 can effectively work as a smart speaker... If I shout at it clearly enough it can play tracks from my USB stick, enter a route into the sat nav, or call people from the address book, even read email and texts if I connect it to my phone. Its certainly not substantially different in behaviour but I certainly would not have seen a car described as a smart speaker (or indeed smart at anything) at the time.
I am fairly sure this would not be licencing SONOS tech (don't flame me if I'm not right as not researched it yet) comes from a completely different part of the world for completely different use cases, yet does the same jobs.
I'm fairly sure that even back in the 90's you could use Dragon software to shout at your PC and it would dictate and manage basic browser and MS media centre stuff.
Much as Google has its faults, there does seem to be a run of last straw clutching going on...