It’s been a chastening couple of years for Sonos after the self-inflicted blow of an app update that was meant to improve discovery and send the app into the future – only for it to send the app into disarray, an issue that it a lot of time for Sonos to retrieve the situation.
So after the soft reboot that was the launch of the Play earlier in 2026, Sonos is back and determined to show that it’s still the multi-room king with the arrival of its latest operating system in Sonos27, which goes full send on AI which Sonos believes will set a path for its future.
Sonos27 arrives at the same time as Sonos’ latest in its growing line of Ultra products, with the launch of the Sonos Ace Ultra and the Sonos Beam Ultra, the former offers tighter integration with the rest of the Sonos’ speakers and soundbars with the introduction of the Headphone Engine 2; while the latter aims to bring even more performance from the slim, compact soundbar form.
There’s plenty riding on these products, which arrive at an inflexion where AI is making its presence felt, but no-one seems altogether sure as to how to properly harness it – might Sonos have found a way to utilise AI for good?
AI now and forever more?
Artificial Intelligence is not everyone’s favourite subject of late. Despite it making waves in media cycles, you can’t mention AI without looking at both the good and bad it brings. AI may be making things more efficient and helping connectivity, but it’s also making things a great deal more expensive.
Sonos is looking at the positives, framing the Sonos27 OS as a major platform milestone that’ll bring improvements to all its products.
As I was told in a conversation with Sonos’ engineers and designers ahead of the launch, the “Sonos 27 is the operating system for your home… it’s the culmination of all the work that we’ve done over the 20 years”, and that this new platform wants to reshape what people view Sonos as, not just as a speaker company but what Sonos views itself as, “an audio operating system for the home”, with Sonos 27 being “a system that lets you create the sound experience in your home”.
There have been mumblings among users that Sonos’ current voice control is limited (and it is), but Sonos 27 Voice looks to change that, with Sonos investment in AI creating a custom LLM-trained-assistant that’s focused on audio and home context.
Using Sonos’ MCP (Model Context Protocol) and AI agents that’ll be able to plug into the system (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc), users can prompt the system to deliver more natural and more specific answers. The example given was if you wanted to start “some music for my dinner party”, you’d ask through Voice Control and will serve up some tunes to go with your food. You voice, at least in this context, becomes the remote through which you can operate and find what you want.
The Sonos Custom Agents will allow users to create their own agents, each “with its own model, persona and voice”, creating a personalised assistant that’s by your side. It’s a cool idea, though I wonder if it’ll be able to learn from you over time but if there’s a thing that AI doesn’t seem to be great at, it’s specificity.
The ‘fabric’ that ties everything together
Sonos Fabric is what ties the system together, creating a whole that you can continually add, an organism that works in sync rather than coming up against brick walls in the system you can’t get past.
Ahead of the original Ace headphones launching, there was the belief that these headphones would link directly to your Sonos system, and you could fling music from a speaker to the headphone.
That wasn’t the case, if anything that was hype not from Sonos but from those excited about the headphones finally being a thing. The disappointment set it with the realisation that this direct linking could only be done with the soundbar through the TV Audio Swap feature, which admittedly was very good, but not what people were hoping.
Fabric can change that, and the new Headphone Engine 2 in the Ace Ultra makes that an actual reality. You can pull in sound from another speaker into the headphones if, for instance, you want some private listening, and you can push the sound back to a speaker in your home with the touch of a button. The headphone swap is no longer restricted to the Ace range and the soundbars.
You will now be able to use Sonos’ portable speakerswithin a home cinema set-up, though both speakers have to be of the same model to act as rear gunners. You cannot, for example, have a Move 2 and a Play speaker as your surrounds – it needs to be either two Move 2 speakers, or two Move Plays.
It’s that simple, and hopefully seamless, approach to unifying a system that AI’s potential seems to be able to unlock. Ahead of the launch, I wrote about Sonos needing to focus on its identity and be more Sonos. It looks like AI is helping them to do just that.
But it has to be good
The scope of what Sonos is doing and the improvements they’re bringing to the platform are all well and good but there was confidence about the previous major overhaul to the app – and look how that turned out. This can’t be another false dawn.
But the signs coming out of Sonos appear to be right. Before, you could argue that Sonos became arrogant and through the chaos of the previous app update, got hit with the hubris stick.
It’s led to big changes – a new CEO – and a new direction, ditching some products that weren’t fit for release (the mystery TV streamer) and a fresh focus in its embrace of AI.
The Ace Ultra needs to be better than the original Ace, which were solid but not up the standard of Bose or Sony. The Beam Gen 2 has arguably been the best compact soundbar since it launched, but the five-star JBL Bar 300Mk2 has knocked it off its perch in our best lists, and given the price difference between the new soundbar (£699 / $699!), it’s not a guarantee that the Beam Ultra will hop back atop the throne that Sonos has sat on for so many years.
We’ll see if Sonos is truly back once the new products are in the wild, and we’ll also have a gander of what the future holds in this increasingly AI-powered world.
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