Sonos 27 Debuts: AI-Powered Audio Operating System Launches with New Ace Ultra and Beam Ultra

Sonos Has New Devices, a New OS, and Yes, a New App

Sonos is cramming AI into its software because it's "very hot these days." The new features, which include agentic automation, are opt-in. Sonos has a new app. Stop me if you've heard this one before. The smart speaker company, long a darling of the audio industry, undid much of the goodwill it earned with its multiroom speakers through a bevy of software updates that broke its app in 2024. Almost all app users hated it, citing the loss of features like volume control and accessibility tools meant to help blind people use the wireless speaker system. Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company's furious customers. Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features. The company also announced a new soundbar and its second pair of over-the-ear headphones. Sonos representatives say it doesn't want to be seen as a speaker company anymore, but as something bigger and more holistic. "For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company," says Brandon Holley, the interim hardware lead at Sonos. "What we actually are is an audio operating system." The company is calling that operating system Sonos 27, and it manifests in a few ways. First and foremost: updates to the Sonos app. Sonos 27 App Sonos knows that the words "new Sonos app" might strike fear in the hearts of its users. "When I say that out loud, I know exactly what comes to mind," Sid Patel, vice president of software at Sonos, tells WIRED. Patel says the app was developed with a "customer-centric feedback listening approach" that involves reaching out to the community and being active in forums like Reddit. New features to make the app easier to use will include improved tab navigation, better room sorting, and changes to volume knobs on the app itself. In the fall, Sonos will release system health views that let you diagnose connection issues for each product. The big feature is Sonos 27voice, the company's generative AI integration, which is being released in early access. It lets you talk to the speakers like you would Amazon's Alexa or a Google Home speaker, allowing you to request music based on your mood. It also has a Model Context Protocol, which can connect to your AI service of choice if you want to ask ChatGPT to play music on your speakers. The company is highlighting its Sonos Custom Agents, which let users customize their agents to do various tasks throughout the system, like triggering speakers in a certain room at a certain time. You can also change the voices used if maybe you'd like the AI in your kitchen to sound like a fancy French chef, or have your bathroom speaker talk to you like a pirate. "Obviously AI is something that's very hot these days, clearly," Patel says. "So we have integrated various pieces of AI into our system." When asked what products Sonos 27 and its AI features would work with, a Sonos representative wrote via email that Sonos 27 will work in Sonos' S2 app, but not the S1 app -- the version that controls some older Sonos equipment. So owners of older Sonos hardware won't be able to access these new AI features. "Sonos 27 is designed to take advantage of newer hardware capabilities, so not every product will support every new feature," the representative wrote. "We want to be transparent about those limitations while continuing to support products with security and ongoing updates for as long as the hardware allows." Despite the stated effort to be transparent, Sonos says it won't release details about compatibility or upgrade paths for each product until "a later date." Sonos Fabric Sonos has an official name for the network its products use to sync across rooms: Sonos Fabric. "Sonos Fabric is the name of the magic that has existed for what Sonos was built on," Patel says. "The idea of, you have one speaker, two speakers, three speakers, and how they magically work together in a home theater setup or a bonded setup or group." Two new features are coming to that newly christened technology. One is what Sonos calls portable surround, which enables users to take devices from one room to another and have them sync there. So if you have a main soundbar by your TV but want to bring in another couple of speakers from other rooms to act as surround sound speakers for movie night, the Sonos products can detect their location and moderate which audio to play where. Second is the ability to switch audio between the speakers and headphones, which Sonos calls Headphone Linking. Sonos Ace Ultra Sonos' first pair of over-ear headphones arrived in 2024, right during the height of the Sonos app woes. The Sonos Ace were very good, except the headphones didn't work within Sonos' speaker ecosystem. Sonos wants to fix that problem with its follow-up headset, the Sonos Ace Ultra. It has 35 hours of battery life and can connect to devices via USB-C and 3.5 mm. More importantly, it can connect to other Sonos speakers via Wi-Fi. The Ace Ultra runs on Sonos Fabric, which means it can connect to your wider Sonos system and let you switch playback between speakers and the headphones "With a single push of a button, you'll be able to suck music into your headphones," Patel says. Sonos Beam Ultra Sonos introduced a new soundbar, called the Beam Ultra. It's an upgrade of the company's existing Sonos Beam with nine drivers, four more than the past Beams. They're also upward-firing drivers that bounce the sound off your ceiling for better acoustics. The Beam Ultra has AI-enabled features, like AI speech enhancement that aims to make dialog more discernible in loud scenes. The Beam Ultra can connect via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and wired HDMI eARC. This is a lot of change for Sonos, something the company hasn't always handled gracefully. Sonos' home systems already aren't the easiest to set up, sometimes requiring separate apps for older products. The company may be rejiggering itself as an "audio operating system," but its software has long been the source of its troubles with getting its products to work right. Will AI smarts fix that? Maybe for its newer devices. But anyone with an existing system may still struggle. The AI features on products and in the Sonos 27 app will be opt-in, meaning you can avoid them entirely. "That really is our new approach to our app release," Patel says. "We're going to bring our customers along. We're going to listen more." That would be a good plan. Sounds like Sonos' speakers will be listening more, too.

After two years of turmoil, Sonos attempts a triumphant return.

At an event in New York City, Sonos announced two new audio products -- the Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar and Sonos Ace Ultra headphones, details of which were found in an FCC filing in early August -- and a major update to its audio operating system dubbed Sonos 27. It's the biggest single Sonos announcement since 2024, when a new app rollout upset its customers and sent it into damage control mode. Software changes are core to Sonos' announcements, with the company leaning heavily into AI integration with Sonos 27. This includes the company's own Sonos 27voice assistant that it built in-house for music and system control. It's coming as an early access, opt-in feature this fall. There's also Sonos 27mcp, which gives the ability to connect any existing AI models such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini -- although for some reason Google Assistant is still not natively supported. Sonos 27mcp launches in early access on September 8th. In addition, users will be able to create up to 10 of their own agents through Sonos 27 to run, with whichever model they choose. These custom agents can be given different voices and roles. Brandon Holley, senior director of product development, gave examples of having a moody detective give you the morning news or a motivational coach whisper motivational aspirations when you wake up. Custom agents won't be available until sometime in 2027. Both Sonos 27mcp and the custom agents seem to expand the customization and control of a Sonos system beyond what the app and Sonos 27voice is capable of. All products compatible with the current Sonos app can be controlled with Sonos 27mcp, and everything with a microphone works with Sonos 27voice. When the Sonos custom agents are available, they'll work everywhere Sonos 27voice is enabled. There are two new features being added to Sonos Fabric, which is the name given to its whole-home connected system. The wireless Play and Move 2 portable speakers can be used as surround sound speakers in a home theater system. Once in place, the speakers will automatically configure to their new positions and roles as surround speakers without needing to initiate setup in the Sonos app. It's not possible to use this feature with a single Play or Move 2. Compatible Sonos headphones will now be included in a Sonos home system and support moving sound between speakers and headphones -- the system senses the closest speaker and will pass the audio from it to the headphones. Headphone linking, as Sonos calls it, will roll out as an early access feature on September 29th. Sonos hints that this is just the beginning of added features, but no further details about possible future options were given. Improvements continue to come to the app, as well, again with feedback from the community, including the Sonos subreddit. Home, system, and search tabs will be added across the bottom of the screen, and a room sort option can be pinned to the top for easier access to a customizable list. There's a cool feature that calls back to physical audio components: a virtual volume knob, you control with two fingers like you would in the real world. It's not a major quality of life improvement, but it's something that adds character and fun, and something I'll probably use regularly. The new navigation, room sorts, and virtual volume knob starts rolling out on September 8 (although the volume knob will only launch on iOS at that time). Lockscreen controls for volume and play/pause are also returning to the app, and started rolling out on August 17th. System health views to help troubleshoot issues and presets will roll out at some point later this fall. It's not just software announcements, though, as Sonos has two new products coming -- the long-rumored Ace Ultra headphones and Beam Ultra soundbar. The Sonos Ace Ultra are what the original Sonos Ace should have been from the beginning -- an integrated part of the Sonos ecosystem. They are built upon Sonos' Headphone Engine 2, which allows them to use the headphone linking feature rolling out at the same time as the headphones release on September 29th. A button on the headphones allows audio to be passed between a speaker and the headphones. No phone is necessary if it's out of reach. They look very similar to the Ace, with what appears to be slightly different button placement on the left ear cup. The Ace Ultra are also a little bigger, with a little more space in the ear cup, and 10 grams heavier. They have newly custom-designed 40mm drivers and 10 microphones for noise control (two more than the Ace) which Sonos claims makes their ANC twice as effective at noise cancellation than the Ace with "the frequencies that really matter," as Brandon Holley told me. Those frequencies happen to be 65Hz (the general frequency of an HVAC) where the Sonos Ace Ultra are 2.2 times more effective, and 120Hz -- the airplane drone range -- where they're 1.8 times better. No information is provided for performance with the chatter you might encounter at the coffee shop, for example. An adaptive EQ adjusts the sound, compensating for any air leaks in the headphones' fit due to glasses, jewelry, or hair. It includes both a 3-band and 8-band EQ to customize the sound for your taste. In addition to SBC and AAC codecs, the Ace Ultra supports aptX Adaptive Lossless over Bluetooth, and 16-bit/48kHz high resolution when connected with USB-C. Battery life has improved by five hours, with the Sonos Ace Ultra offering up to 35 hours of listening with ANC on. A fast charge of three minutes gets an additional three hours of listening time. Instead of just black and white, the Ace Ultra are also available in a muted blue agave and beige sand color. The headphones release on September 29th for $449. The Beam Ultra is a completely redesigned 7.1.2 compact soundbar (as opposed to the 5.0 configuration of its predecessor), including two up-firing drivers to support Dolby Atmos spatial audio. The center channel mid-tweeter features a new waveguide, mechanic and acoustic design, and DSP, which includes four levels of AI speech enhancement for clarity. While the Beam Ultra still has a compact design, to accommodate the additional speakers it is just under four inches longer than the Beam Gen 2. It comes in a black or white matte finish, and will be available for purchase on September 29th for $699. With the headphones' deeper integration into the Sonos ecosystem and the addition of up-firing drivers to the Beam Ultra, it looks like Sonos has made some great improvements to already solid products. But I won't know for sure until I can dig into them for reviews. The app updates -- particularly the AI integration -- I'm a bit more cautious about. But Sonos is making the right move by rolling out the updates over time, allowing its users to opt in to early access instead of dumping it on everyone at once. This more measured approach could be what wins back the masses.

'Sonos 27' brings a refreshed UI to the app and lets AI agents control your system - Engadget

Sonos says its system will be able to communicate with any AI system the user chooses. Alongside a new soundbar and headphones, Sonos is announcing an updated app and some major changes to the underlying OS that powers all of its products. Forgive me for immediately delving into the recent past, but this is likely the biggest software update the company has announced since its absolutely disastrous app update in 2024. Without rehashing too much, Sonos rushed the app update out to enable functionality for its new Ace headphones, but it was missing a ton of key features and was extremely buggy. The cascading effects of this resulted in the dismissal of CEO Patrick Spence and a 2025 where the company didn't release any new products. But enough about the past. We have to imagine that Sonos learned enough from the 2024 debacle to make sure things are locked up for the launch of Sonos 27 -- yup, the company is giving its OS annual version numbers going forward. Perhaps the most significant and inevitable new feature is the ability to let AI control your Sonos system. The Sonos 27 platform will let users connect "any outside AI assistant or agent," including ChatGPT. This means you'll be able to ask whatever AI you're already using to control your system without interrupting whatever else you might be doing. I'm looking at this as an expansion of what Sonos did years ago when it enabled voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant to work on its speakers. Google Assistant is now Gemini, and Alexa has gotten a healthy dose of AI as well, so in a lot of ways this is just Sonos keeping up with where the trend is going. Sonos says that it hosts a public MCP (model context protocol) server that any AI can discover and connect to; from there you should be able to ask AI to do everything you'd expect like play specific songs, move audio between speaers or groups, adjust volume and so forth. Sonos is also previewing Sonos Custom Agents, which the company says will let people create agents with their own "model, persona and voice." And the company also mentioned an updated Sonos 27 voice assistant, "the company's own assistant built for music and mood curation." How this differs from the existing Sonos voice assistant, which is admittedly pretty basic isn't yet clear. There wasn't much detail on either of these features, but we'll be asking Sonos to explain more. Fortunately, there are some other noteworthy features that don't involve AI assistants or agents. "Sonos Fabric" is an entirely new capability that'll allow the company's products to "sense" other members of a system and adapt accordingly. What this enables in practice is a feature that changes a speakers role depending on where it is placed. For starters, this means that if you have a pair of Move 2 or Play speakers and place them behind your couch, they can automatically work as surround sound speakers for a Sonos soundbar. Sonos says that this is accomplished by using a high-frequency sound that'll sense a speaker's location and change its role accordingly, without any input needed from the user. Another new feature under the Fabric umbrella is for the just-announced Ace Ultra headphones. Headphone linking will connect the Ace Ultra to a Sonos system almost as if it's another speaker -- that'll let you send audio from speakers directly to the headphones. Sonos says this will be an "early access" feature for the Ace Ultra when it arrives on September 29. Finally, the Sonos app is getting redesigned, as well. The company has already made a few navigation tweaks in recent months that make it much easier to choose which speakers you're controlling, but this sounds like a more involved update. Navigation will include persistent home, system and search tabs as well as the ability to pin your favorite speakers; these features all rolled out in testing over the summer. Naturally, this new navigation will become the default when this update rolls out on September 8. It'll also include lock screen controls on iOS, another thing that we've seen recently. Beyond these changes, the Sonos app will support presets, which lets you save a group of speakers, content and volume settings and activate them all with one tap. So if you always want to play the same playlist at low volume on a specific set of speakers every morning, for example, this will streamline that capability. More updates specifically for Apple users include a virtual volume knob -- if you "twist" with two fingers on the screen you can adjust your system volume. It sounds like this gesture will work anywhere in the app. The iPad app is also getting redesigned to take better advantage of the big screen, and Sonos will now work with the Shortcuts app as well. This will let you create specific automations and then trigger them with Siri. Sonos 27 will roll out to any hardware that currently runs on the company's "S2" platform. Sonos made this differentiation a few years back, relegating older projects to the S1 platform. Fortunately, everything but a handful of legacy products work on S2, which means almost everything the company has sold in the last decade or so will work with this new OS. The new app navigation will roll out on September 8, along with the MCP AI features in early access. The portable surrounds feature will also come online that day. Obviously we can't say how this AI integration will work out just yet. But I've been testing the early preview of the Sonos app for a while and can say at the very least that the updated UI is a nice improvement. Hopefully the other changes that they're making work without any major hiccups -- and the new features like auto-switching speaker roles and the system-to-headphone handoff all work as promised.

Sonos 27 is here to clean up the app mess (again) -- this time with AI

Sonos is giving its audio operating system a huge update that adds several AI tools and a speaker sensing tool that could change how you use your speakers: Dubbed Sonos 27 and announced at an event in NYC, this is the latest version of the company's control app and promises to be open and adaptable. "We built our system around a shared love of music and the belief that nothing sets the mood like great sound," CEO Tom Conrad said in a press release. "Sonos 27 takes that further, bringing acoustic engineering, adaptable software, intelligence and design together in a way only Sonos can." The last time Sonos attempted an overhaul, the controversial redesign cost CEO Patrick Spence his job. After public outcry, it took nearly a year for Sonos to bring the app back to an acceptable state. Here's hoping history isn't about to repeat itself with Sonos 27. What's new with Sonos 27? Sonos 27 comes with two AI features, Sonos 27voice and Sonos 27mcp, both of which utilize AI to change how controlling Sonos systems works. Voice is a Sonos-built assistant for music and mood curation. The company is also introducing Sonos Custom Agents, which would allow users to create their own AI agents through the system, "each with its own model, persona and voice." Mcp lets you connect an outside AI chatbot to your Sonos system, including OpenAI's ChatGPT. Sonos claims you could ask ChatGPT to play music anywhere in your home without leaving your AI chat. Sonos didn't provide many details in its press release on how Custom Agents or AI assistant integration will actually work or how you'll connect them to your system, but these details are likely to be discussed during the event in New York City. Other more interesting features One of the more interesting features Sonos announced is called Sonos Fabric, a system capability that is supposed to enable Sonos devices to "sense each other" and then adapt to positioning. According to Sonos, the positioning technology uses high-frequency sound to sense a speaker's location and then adapt its role in the system based on that. Why is this necessary? It specifically enables portable surround sound features that let the Move 2 or Sonos Play become rear surrounds when they're moved into position. (It's unclear whether this will be added to non-portable speakers.) Another new feature launching in Sonos 27 will allow linking the Sonos Ace Ultra (also unveiled today) directly to your speaker system, letting you push or pull sound to and from speakers and your headphones. This is launching in early access to start, so you'll need to sign up for that. Finally, Sonos is adding new features that are supposed to make the app "more intuitive to navigate." Sonos claims these new features were shaped and tested by the Sonos community; hopefully it doesn't break the app like the last update. So when will it be available? Sonos 27 will be available for all Sonos S2 products, though some features are only available on certain devices. (More details to come soon.) The new app navigation features rolls out on September 8, and Sonos 27mcp launches in early access at the same time. This will all roughly align with the launch of two new Sonos products -- the Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar and Sonos Ace Ultra headphones -- that launch on September 29. The Beam Ultra is an updated version of the Sonos Beam Gen 2 mid-sized soundbar that will come in at $699, while the Sonos Ace Ultra headphones are a sequel to the original Sonos Ace that will cost $449 at launch. Both are available for pre-order now. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.

Exclusive: Sonos CEO Tom Conrad explains why the new Sonos Ace Ultra headphones can achieve what fans wanted the first Ace to do, why its new Ultra soundbar is small, and the AI features of the company's new 'operating system'

Sonos has just made three new announcements: it's launching a new pair of headphones called the Sonos Ace Ultra; it's launching a new soundbar called the Sonos Beam Ultra; and it's rebranding its software side as an "operating system" that it's calling Sonos 27 -- and is adding a new AI-enabled voice assistant, new AI agent integration, and smarter ways for its speakers to work together. I spoke to Sonos' CEO Tom Conrad about the new launches -- especially the new software, since any new software changes that Sonos makes will be met with caution from the community, as Conrad and I discussed last time we spoke. First, here's a rundown of the details of what Sonos is launching, starting with the Ace Ultra. These new headphones will launch at $449 / £399 / AU$699, and bring a new 40mm driver promising improved sound -- but more interestingly they're powered by a new chip called the Headphone Engine 2 that means they'll be able to do what people expected the original Sonos Ace to do: they'll be able to work as a standard part of the Sonos ecosystem. The Beam Ultra, meanwhile, sits between the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) and the Sonos Arc Ultra -- it's a compact soundbar, but it delivers 7.1.2 channels of Dolby Atmos sound, using nine drivers (including two upfiring drivers, which is a first for the Beam range). It launches at $699 / £699 / AU$1,099. Both of the new products are available to pre-order on September 1, 2026, and will launch on September 29, 2026. When it comes to software, Sonos has given its platform a name for the first time: Sonos 27. Part of the launch of Sonos 27 is the reveal of Sonos Fabric, which is the name Sonos has given to "the system capability that enables Sonos products to sense each other and adapt to the moment" -- and immediately, Fabric is being used to enable smart music switching on the Ace Ultra, and the ability to have portable surround speakers in Sonos home theater setups. Conrad will explain both of those in our interview. There are two other new elements to Sonos 27, though. Sonos 27voice is a new voice assistant that's based on AI tech, and Sonos 27mcp is a new way for AI agents to connect to Sonos systems and control them. In our conversation, Conrad dug into why the company is doing all of this and what the company is offering for AI skeptics -- so let's get into it, starting with Conrad's explanation of why they wanted to give the software a name at last. Tom Conrad: When I got the nod to become permanent CEO about a year ago, one of my observations about the company's recent history was that while we had started as a system company, we had spent the last almost decade being really focused on getting great at shipping individual products, filling out the product line with every shape and form that our customers were interested in. Small, medium, and large soundbars; a couple sizes of subwoofer; big amplifiers, small amplifiers; portables... you get the point. And Patrick [Spence, former Sonos CEO] and the team became a really well-oiled machine with respect to hardware execution. But in doing that, I think the unintended consequence was that at times we took our eye off the ball [regarding] what it meant to bring those products together into a cohesive whole. And someone shortly after I arrived said that the thing about Sonos is it's really 100% hardware and 100% software. And I love that framing, because it's so right. We have these two really hard problems to solve, and if either one of them doesn't get complete dedicated focus from exactly the right people, we don't deliver what our customers expect. And so, we've done all kinds of things to elevate the software expertise in the company over the course of the last year. And at the same time, we've really invested in the idea that the software is what makes the system. And as you look at how we've taken our products to market through the years, we've always given the hardware a name -- Arc and Ace and Beam and Move -- but the software has never had a name. So one of the big announcements this week is that we're giving the software a name. And what we make is really an operating system for audio experiences in the home -- and 'OS' has always been there in our name! And so we're simply calling the software Sonos 27 because, really, it is that 'systemness' that the software provides that makes Sonos. And we're attaching the year moniker to it, because Sonos does get better year after year. There'll be a Sonos28 and a Sonos29 and so on. Matt Bolton: As soon as I saw the name, my first thought was whether this means we're talking about a planned update cadence, and that feels like it would probably be a different approach than Sonos would have necessarily taken in the past? Tom Conrad: Yeah, I think one of the things about the company for the last many years is that because we only talked about the hardware, anything we wanted to do in software had to kind of 'ride along' on the hardware itself. And so we'd add Atmos, or we'd add voice assistants, or we'd add new surround experiences, but they would always be tied to the fact that we're making a new soundbar, so we can work on home theater experiences. We're making a product with a microphone so we can work on voice products. By separating out the idea of the operating system, we're giving it its own identity, its own road map, its own cadence of release, which we think is a really exciting change for the company. And our customers can expect that the software doesn't get better only when we release new hardware. And it doesn't even get better just once a year. It gets better all the time through the year, which I think fits a new, modern way that people talk about their software platforms. Matt Bolton: What we've been seeing more recently is you guys rolling out improvements and features on a pretty regular basis. The question I have as a user is: does this mean that I'm going to be waiting for a once-a-year Sonos 27 update to get new features? Tom Conrad: I understand that feeling. But I think if you look at even what Apple does now, they once a year talk about their new operating system, and then the features roll out through the year, some of which they've sort of talked about in their big moments and some of which are a surprise and delight along the way, and our model will be exactly the same. Matt Bolton: I assume this means that you've got a road map already in mind that covers Sonos 28 and Sonos 29. How far in advance are you thinking? Tom Conrad: We do, for sure. Certainly, the list of things that I want to accomplish in software runs to many years. But one of the unique opportunities in software -- unlike hardware, where you have to make these bets that go out, two or three years after you start programs -- is that in software, even a big program might be six months of effort. And so, while I like to have a two- or three-year road map for software, I like to be constantly replanning so that we can react to what's happening in our customers' lives. If you think back three years ago, for example, we hadn't even had the ChatGPT moment yet. And so, to have a locked three-year roadmap and be resolutely dedicated to that path, not understanding how the world has changed in the last three years, would be foolish. And so we have a plan, but also the wisdom to be constantly reevaluating and reprioritizing as our customers' needs evolve. Matt Bolton: How far ahead do you plan to communicate to customers what is coming? Like you say, Apple will announce at WWDC things it doesn't expect to necessarily launch until quite a bit later in the year. Tom Conrad: I think it's likely that we'll do a couple of events or moments a year where we talk about what's coming and what's newly available. And so I think you can expect, in many years, there'll be kind of a fall event, like this one, where we talk about our big plans for the year, and then there'll be kind of a midyear check-in where we'll add to the story. Matt Bolton: So let's talk about AI integration. Generally, people have gotten to the point where they're now pretty skeptical of AI features being added to everything, but it sounds like you're taking a practical approach. So how do you assess what you should build and integrate -- what you can do with, as you say, the three years of the ChatGPT 'moment'? Tom Conrad: I guess we'll start with what we do for skeptics. The things that we do with conversational AI are completely opt-in experiences, to the point that our speakers all have a hard microphone button on them, so you press it, and it literally breaks the electrical connection between the microphone and the rest of the device. So for those who are uninterested in this moment, we provide a platform that I think has incredible utility, even absent modern AI-powered capabilities. But I think in some ways, the more exciting dimension of what we're doing is that we're really not starting from, 'Oh, there is this incredible new technology in large language model, generative conversational AI infrastructure, what can we build with that?' Instead, we're starting from really spending time with our customers and understanding what they might want to do with voice in the context of Sonos in their home. And we have the room to do that because we've been shipping voice assistants on Sonos for nearly a decade, including our own. And when I talk to customers, they say, 'I love the idea that I can engage with the Sonos system in my home without taking my phone out of my pocket. It takes a long time for me to get to the app, my partner looks at me sideways. Like, why are you on your phone when we're having a conversation?' I mean, I think broadly you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who's like, 'I wish that the people I share my home with were on their phone more.' Instead, they're looking for ways to put the phones in a drawer and enjoy being together. I think voice is intuitively a great way to solve that, and that's why Sonos One, our first product that had a voice assistant, was such a smash hit 10 years ago. I think people understood that this is a great way to engage. But, unfortunately, the [voice] agents themselves really didn't meet the expectations of the customer. When I go out and talk to people, the first thing they say is not crazily complex scenarios about how to control my smart home in nine different ways -- all this stuff that you hear about from other players in the industry. They say, 'I just want to be able to talk to the assistant about what I want the same way I would talk to a human being.' I wanna be able to say, 'Play that album that I loved in college, with the one with the singer from the Cocteau Twins. I think the band did the theme song to that Fox show. What's it called? It's about a doctor who's really grumpy all the time. Oh, yeah. It's called House.' And, certainly, with first-generation voice assistants, even if they knew the name of the song, they would have to remember that you have to say 'Play this song by this artist' and not say the album and not say the artist first -- and [we had to] guess what the agent is thinking. So job one, two, three, four, five, and six is: speak to this thing naturally. The second thing that they say is they don't really care about all of these seemingly made-up examples of things that tech companies seem to think that we want to do. 'I looked at your calendar and noticed that you have people coming for brunch tomorrow, and the refrigerator says you're out of eggs. So I'm gonna text your wife to tell her that you've gone to the store to get-'... I mean, no one wants the system in your walls to do that stuff in the real world, I don't think. But they do want to be able to quickly control 'atmosphere', I would call it -- which means music, means a soundtrack, and often means lighting. And yeah, they wanna be able to set timers. They wanna be able to ask about the weather. Everything else is really far down the list from there. So we built [Sonos 27voice] to do exactly those things. It's really fast. It's really reliable. It's really resilient to anything you throw at it linguistically. And I think people are gonna be really delighted with just the fact that it just works. One benefit to narrowing the problem domain to exactly what customers are asking for is that we're also able to deliver this with modern infrastructure that is affordable to run, which means that we can make it a standard part of the Sonos system without having a secondary subscription on top -- which is another dimension that people, I think, really want. They don't want another line item on their credit card just to be able to control the ambiance in their home. Matt Bolton: What is the technology in the background? Are you using a particular language model? Are you running on your own servers or tying into someone else's systems? Tom Conrad: Let me give you the one last piece of the puzzle that we hear from customers, because it will help me explain the architecture. They do also say that they want access to comprehensive world knowledge. I'm in the kitchen. I'm cooking a pork tenderloin. I wanna know what the temperature should be for it to be safe to eat. My wife and I are having a debate about the name of the actor from Ted Lasso. And people want the voice assistants to be able to talk to them about the world. So you need something that is everything that I described, but also has the wisdom to reach out to a more sophisticated general-purpose model when the query is outside of the domain of ambiance and timers and weather and the stuff that makes up 95% of what people ask. So we've built our own core model that is a purpose-built, fine-tuned, kind of mid-scale large language model, if you like, that we run on our own infrastructure and answers that 95%, and then reliably routes to an external frontier model for the general knowledge or complex questions. And we'll even do fun things, like if the frontier model can help in the task of figuring out the music, it will do that too. So you can say things like, 'Find some music that's breaking through on TikTok and filter it through that shoegaze music that I liked when I was in college in the nineties and make a playlist for me.' And it will use the frontier model to understand what's being talked about on TikTok. It'll use our infrastructure to understand my musical taste, and then it'll build a playlist and go. So that's what we're doing with Sonos 27voice. Matt Bolton: I assume the frontier model will change over time, but which one are you using for launch? Tom Conrad: We're not talking about the infrastructure at launch, but you're right to assume that part of the flexibility here is to be able to trade in and out frontier models to optimize costs, et cetera. Matt Bolton: The other side of the AI features you announced that I'm really interested in is the MCP integration. Sonos has this long history of being relatively developer-friendly and open, which you guys emphasized a lot in the announcement of this OS. So the MCP integration feels like you're re-embracing the element of wanting people to be making stuff that works with your system. Tom Conrad: I think one of the exciting things that's happened in the last, not even two years, but in the last six months, is that suddenly we see ordinary people are able to make software, right? And I know we see it all over the company, and we see it all around the world with our customers. Already, unofficial hacked API access to Sonos is a very common, vibe-coded use case, and you hear people, lots of very high-profile people, talking about controlling their system. And then I meet customers all the time who are experimenting with these things. And so, we're launching Sonos 27mcp, which makes a supported, full surface-area set of actions in the Sonos system available to our customers, to interact with music through any agent that they choose. Sonos will show up in the Claude connector directory -- and the ChatGPT connector directory, and the Grok connector directory, and the Gemini connector directory -- alongside Slack and Calendar and Figma, all the other things that you might interact with in Claude on any given day. And you can do pedestrian things like turn the music down in Claude or whatever you're using on your phone, in their app, in their desktop app, in a web browser. It will have enough context to understand that the music is on your Sonos system, and it will find the music that's playing and turn it down. And it will also chain tools together, so you could say things like, 'Look at my calendar and see the party that's coming up, look at who's coming, help me figure out what would be a great set of music to play based on what we know about these people from my email history with them.' It's a terrible made-up example. But it's really good at chaining together a bunch of tools and its own native inference and doing these things. And then as you point out, in the sort of hobbyist community, there's this tremendous opportunity to make bespoke control experiences, both software and hardware, using this infrastructure to integrate Sonos into the emerging agentic frameworks like OpenClaw and Hermes. There's going to be dozens of these things that take over, over the course of the next year, and we'll be able to participate in that. I think it's just gonna be really fun to see what our customers do with this. And I think it's a really unique capability, because to do it well, you have to have both the technical infrastructure -- which is to say access to the nouns and verbs of your system through the internet -- which very few people have. And then you also have to have the, like, philosophical perspective that says openness is good, and allowing integration and access from these third-party systems doesn't disintermediate us. It elevates us, and not every company -- maybe no other company -- has that perspective. Matt Bolton: It feels like it must be part of building a future-proof system as well, because MCP seems like quite an agnostic approach, and it means that if, say, Apple adds good MCP support to Siri, you don't have to do anything to support it. But at the same time, does it make it any harder for you to develop on your end knowing that you're going to have this really open-ended way for agents to come in and interact with the system? Does that complicate building and planning features in any way? Tom Conrad: First, just as a footnote, I should say that it may turn out that Apple's answer to all of this integration is not MCP, but what they call App Intents. And we're also, in this moment, shipping App Intent support on Apple's platform, so we have that piece as well. It's kind of a semantically one-to-one mapping -- where the connector lives is different, but what you can do with it is very similar. How do I say this... Maybe the worst of all worlds is to have all of the third-party engagement with your product be done through hacks and unsupported APIs... I have a friend who has a newborn, and he gets up early to work. He wants to be notified when his wife wakes up, so that he could put the coffee on. And so he basically just set [Claude] Fable about the task of, like, 'Figure out when my wife wakes up'. And so the agent hacked his smart bed. And then he's like, 'And start the coffee maker [at that point]'. And it hacked the API for his coffee maker. I don't know that I wanna be on the receiving end of that universe, because now when I change an implementation detail, it breaks these experiences. And I think the customer blames the coffee maker company and the smart bed brand. They don't blame the fact that they essentially had hacked themselves on top of some infrastructure that was never meant to be built upon. And so I think the new world sort of demands a certain amount of willingness to participate in this, and I'm really excited at the idea that the MCP infrastructure gives us a really nice structured way to not just do it once and have it applied to multiple platforms, but to do it in a way that allows for a layer of compatibility as we evolve the back-end services. Matt Bolton: The other thing I wanted to ask regarding so much talk of this being an open platform is just how open are we talking? Would we see Sonos 27 on other devices, on non-Sonos hardware? Tom Conrad: I think, for now, the magic of Sonos really is the marrying up of what we do in hardware and then what we do with software. And so you'd never say never, but at least as it relates to the core audio business that we're in, I think we're focused on making our own exceptional experiences for the home. I will put a tiny asterisk on that. We have a great partnership with Peloton that started with us tuning the audio experience in their newest equipment, but is extending over time to allow the Sonos system in their customers' homes to become the audio destination for [their products' audio output]. It's not quite us bringing the operating system into other people's audio hardware, but it's a good example of continuing the work that we've all already done to integrate everywhere where our customers wanna be. Matt Bolton: In the Sonos Ace Ultra, obviously the big headline hook for the hardcore Sonos fans is going to be the Sonos system connectivity that people had hoped the first Ace would have. Why is the new Headphone Engine 2 hardware necessary to make that happen? Tom Conrad: There were two pieces to unlocking the headphone connectivity for the system. The first is that we needed Wi-Fi performance and secure storage transport of [security] credentials, which is deeply embedded into the actual silicon that goes into the headphone. Unfortunately, Ace doesn't have that platform, so we couldn't responsibly bring the feature to Ace without putting your Wi-Fi password, for example, at risk on an open network during configuration. And without the improved Wi-Fi capability of the headset itself, we couldn't get the kind of 'walk around your home' networking performance that we wanted for the product. But to your point, I'm really proud of the original Ace. They're super comfortable. They've got great battery life. They've got best-in-class noise cancellation performance. They're great headphones. But it is the best example of how, in that chapter, the company had forgotten how important it is to make sure that the products we make are really part of the system, and not just an exceptional pair of headphones. Because let's be honest, there are lots of exceptional headphones in the world. And so from the jump on Ace Ultra, we knew that we had to do the thing that our customers most wanted, which was to make the headphones an intuitive part of the [Sonos] system. There are two mechanisms for engaging with this feature. The first is really kind of magical: you can walk up to any speaker that's playing in your home, press a button on the headset, and the music just jumps from the speaker into the headphone. You can then walk to some other part of your house, press the button again as you stand in front of [another speaker], and the music or content jumps from the headphone to the speaker. No app, no delay, no Bluetooth; it's really just the Sonos 'Fabric' tech facilitating this effortless, seamless experience around the home. I said there were two things that unlock this capability. The first is the hardware that lives in the new headphones. The second is something that happens in the operating system itself, which is that -- with the launch of Amp Multi -- we built a virtualization technology that allows a single instance of the Sonos OS to host multiple instances of the runtime. And what that's for in Amp Multi is that you've got one box running four rooms. We've taken that capability and extended it to the whole modern speaker family, so that this Sonos Play that's sitting on my desk with me can run more than one instance of the runtime. And so the headphones, which don't have the CPU horsepower to run the full Sonos stack, doesn't have to -- because it can nominate a speaker on your network to be its proxy. And so when you when the music jumps from the speaker [to the headphones], we spin up a virtual instance of Sonos [software] in one of the speakers -- it might be the one you're standing in front of, it might be another one that's less utilized -- and send audio over the network as a stream to the headphones, rather than running the full stack in the headset. And what's cool about this is whatever speaker is doing that work still has the performance overhead to run as a speaker to play music for someone else in the home. So it's a deceptively simple feature that has a lot...underneath it. Sonos Fabric is the moniker that we've given to the fundamental technology of Sonos that bonds, and groups, and links headphones. And the other exciting thing that we're doing with Fabric in this release is that we're enabling what we call portable surrounds, which is the ability to take a Sonos Play or a Move and to use them as surrounds in a home theater setup. So the idea is you've got Sonos Play or a couple of Moves in the kitchen, the backyard, whatever -- for movie night, you can bring them in, set them down [behind you], and use them for the surround Atmos experience in your family room. And then when you're done, put them back to work in other places in your house. What's so cool about this technologically is that the way a speaker becomes part of your home theater is fundamentally technically different than the way that a speaker joins the grouping architecture of Sonos [for multi-room], because the latency requirements between the soundbar and the surround speakers are much higher. So when a speaker joins a home theater configuration, it actually, from a networking standpoint, connects directly to the soundbar. It doesn't go through your home network. And so when you take a speaker that was in the kitchen as part of the grouping architecture, and move it into a [home theater] satellite position, a whole bunch of magic stuff has to happen. First of all, the soundbar and the speaker have to recognize one another. And so we use the accelerometer in the portable speaker to understand that it's been picked up and set down. And when it's set down, we send an ultrasonic signal. If there's a soundbar in the room that can hear it, it sends a signal back, and they do a handshake to figure out left-to-right distance, to automatically tune, and spin up to the home theater networking connection -- all without you doing anything. No app involved at all. It's another one you kinda have to experience to really appreciate, but I'm super excited to begin to ship these much more flexible home theater configurations. It's unlike anything that the rest of the industry is delivering today. Matt Bolton: Can you tell me about the new driver design in the Ace Ultra? What did you want to change compared to the previous one? Tom Conrad: We have just some of the most sophisticated audio engineers in the world working on these products, and they wanted to deliver deeper bass, clearer details, and a clearer soundstage with less distortion. We had the opportunity to go in and build a custom driver for Ace Ultra to tune it in the studio with some of the best, and award-winning audio engineers in the world. You have to hear it and compare it side by side with Ace, but I think you'll find that it has a deeper bass response, clearer detail, [better] balance across the audio spectrum. Matt Bolton: I thought it was really interesting that the Beam Ultra comes in kind of as a replacement for where the original Arc ended up in the product range following the launch of the Amp Ultra. Why did you go down the route of squeezing more channels into the smaller Beam body, instead of sticking with the bigger and more flexible Arc shape to fill that role? Tom Conrad: Our goal was to deliver truly the best midsize soundbar in the world. There are still plenty of people around the world that want a smaller form factor. They want something that can tuck underneath the television when it's sitting on a credenza, or for a smaller television. Or, frankly, they just want an object that doesn't call as much attention to itself as a larger soundbar. And yet they want full true 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos. They want a height experience that puts them really inside the action. And so with Beam Ultra, we built a system that has nine drivers, including two upfiring drivers, that bounce audio off the ceiling and the walls to create that immersion. If you spend time with any home theater customer, you understand that they really want a pristine dialogue experience where the dialogue always cuts through the busy scenes. And so the center soundstage of Beam Ultra is dramatically improved. They also want bass that lands with a tremendous weight without having to put a subwoofer into the room. They want music that's expansive and has a clear soundstage. And the creators want products that recreate their intention in the family room with great accuracy. It's so hard to talk about these products that deliver these sound experiences before people have the chance to experience them in person. But everyone we're sharing Beam Ultra with just can't believe the amount of sound experience and presence you get out of such a small soundbar. Matt Bolton: So was it the case that when you were speaking to customers, you figured out that if people are buying at this kind of midrange price, they more often want the smaller size rather than the bigger size -- even if that adds complication on your end? Tom Conrad: That's right. I mean, we already have the best-in-the-world large soundbar in Arc Ultra. And so the question really was for the rest of the market: what can we do to make a huge generational leap in capability here? And that's the place that Beam Ultra comes from. Matt Bolton: It feels like you could have gone with 5.1.2 channels on the Beam Ultra, and that probably would have made people happy if delivered with higher quality. What was there in the development that meant that you settled on 7.1.2 as necessary, or the right option? Tom Conrad: Well, I think part of it is that we deliver in Beam itself such an exceptional experience around the 5.1.2 experience. We really wanted to find a way to expand the product portfolio rather than just refreshing Beam. And so, in this moment, Beam will stay in the market as our solution for the customer that is more price-conscious and who wants that 5.1.2 experience, and Beam Ultra sits above it to deliver a more immersive Atmos surround experience.