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.”