Sonos Launches AI Voice Control, New Headphones and a Soundbar, But Older Hardware Gets Left Behind

Key points

• Sonos announced a sweeping app update called Sonos 27, including AI voice control, in mid-2025.
• The Sonos Ace Ultra over-ear headphones are the company's first headphones to connect to its wider speaker network via Wi-Fi.
• The Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar has nine drivers, four more than previous Beam models, plus AI speech enhancement for dialogue clarity.
• Sonos 27's AI features won't work on older Sonos hardware running the legacy S1 app.
• All AI features are opt-in; users who want nothing to do with them can ignore them entirely.

Sonos broke its own app in 2024. That is not a rumour. The company pushed a software update that stripped out basic features: volume control, accessibility tools that blind users depended on. Customers were furious. Sonos eventually fired its chief executive and spent months apologising under new leadership.

Now the company's back with another new app. Understandably, some users will read that sentence and feel a cold sweat.

What is actually new?

Sonos is calling its new platform Sonos 27, and it covers three things at once: an updated app, a pair of headphones and a soundbar.

The app improvements are practical. Tab navigation is cleaner, volume knobs work better, room sorting is easier to read at a glance. A system health view, arriving in autumn, will let you spot and diagnose connection problems for individual speakers.

The headline feature is Sonos 27voice, the company's AI voice control, launching in early access. Think of it like Amazon's Alexa or a Google Home speaker built into the Sonos app: you describe the mood you're in, and the system picks music to match. It also supports something called Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets different AI services talk to each other. That means you could ask ChatGPT to queue a playlist on your Sonos speakers instead of using Sonos's own voice assistant. We reported in August how ChatGPT is already reaching into other apps, so this kind of cross-service hookup is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Sonos is also letting users build Custom Agents, small automated routines similar to the shortcuts on your phone, that trigger speakers in a specific room at a set time. You can even change the AI voice: a French chef in the kitchen, a pirate in the bathroom. It's a gimmick, but a harmless one.

Who gets left out?

Anyone with older Sonos hardware should pay close attention. Sonos 27 runs on the S2 app, the current version of Sonos's software. Older products on the S1 app, the legacy version that controls older hardware, won't get the AI features. Sonos says it'll share a full compatibility list "at a later date", which isn't the transparency the company promised after last year's fiasco.

Wired, which reported the details first, noted that Sonos's systems have always been tricky to set up. Strapping AI onto a complicated foundation doesn't automatically make the foundation simpler.

Should existing Sonos owners upgrade?

Not immediately. Wait for the full compatibility list before spending money on new hardware just to access voice features. If you do have a compatible system, all AI tools are opt-in. You're not forced to talk to a pirate-voiced speaker if you'd rather just press play.

The Ace Ultra headphones are the most concrete upgrade for existing Sonos fans. The original Ace, launched in 2024, was well-reviewed but couldn't connect to the Sonos speaker network. Sonos's follow-up fixes that: one button press pulls music from your living-room system straight into your ears.

My honest read: the hardware announcements are solid and the app direction is right. What's being oversold is the AI layer, which is genuinely early-access thin right now. The compatibility list is the only thing that matters before you spend a penny. Watch for that.