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

Sonos 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.