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 new Sonos Ace Ultra over-ear headphones cost an unconfirmed price and are the company's first headphones to work within its wider speaker network.
• The new Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar adds nine drivers and AI speech enhancement to improve dialogue clarity.
• Sonos 27's AI features will not 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, including volume control and accessibility tools that blind users depended on. Customers were furious. Sonos eventually fired its chief executive, installed new leadership and spent months apologising.

Now the company is 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, and 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, which launches 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 are 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, meaning you could ask ChatGPT (OpenAI's chatbot) to queue a playlist on your Sonos speakers if you prefer that to Sonos's own voice assistant.

Sonos is also letting users build Custom Agents, which are 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 itself: a French chef in the kitchen, a pirate in the bathroom. It is 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 still running the S1 app, an older version that controls legacy hardware, will not get the AI features. Sonos says it will share a full compatibility list "at a later date", which is not the transparency the company promised after last year's fiasco.

Wired, which first reported the details, noted that Sonos's systems have always been tricky to set up. Strapping AI onto a complicated foundation does not 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. The good news: if you do have a compatible system, all AI tools are opt-in. You are not forced to talk to a pirate-voiced speaker if you would rather just press play.

The Ace Ultra headphones are the most concrete upgrade for existing Sonos fans. The original Ace headphones, launched in 2024, were well-reviewed but could not connect to the Sonos speaker network. The Ace Ultra fixes that, letting you pull music from your living-room system straight into your ears with one button press.

The honest takeaway: before buying anything new, check whether your current Sonos gear makes it onto the compatibility list. That list matters more than any AI voice feature.