Sonos Begins Rolling Out Sonos 27 App Update

Sonos announced that it’s begun rolling out Sonos 27, its next-generation audio operating system.

“Most of the tech industry ships new capability by shipping new hardware, but we built Sonos differently,” Sonos CEO Tom Conrad says. “Our system grows more capable and smarter over time, so whichever Sonos product you already have at home can do more today than it did last year. That’s exactly what’s rolling out with Sonos 27.”

Sonos announced Sonos 27 alongside its new Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar and Sonos Ace Ultra headphones last week. It appears to be an impressive step forward, not just for adding new capabilities to Sonos smart speaker systems but also for a company still living in the shadow of its 2024 Sonosgate debacle.

Sonos 27 will include a massive set of functional updates that will roll out over time. But here’s what arrives in this initial release:

Sonos 27app. The Sonos app is getting a major refresh with new Home, System, and Search tabs available at the bottom, swipe gestures—including a fun two finger gesture that lets you adjust playback volume as if you’re spinning a physical knob on-screen—support for more Favorites pins, Siri and Shortcuts support on iPhone and iPad, and a refreshed app layout on iPad. (Sonos previously added Live Activity support on iPhone, and a similar feature is coming soon on Android.)

Sonos Fabric. This is the new name for the underlying Sonos service that lets Sonos products sense and, now, adapt to each other. The following two features are considered part of Sonos Fabric.

Portable surrounds. This new feature lets those with two Move 2 or Sonos Play portable speakers position them in a room with a Sonos Arc Ultra, Arc, Beam Ultra, or Beam Gen 2 soundbar and have them be automatically configured as rear speakers in a home theater setup. You can later move them elsewhere in the home normally, or use them outside, and they will perform as portable speakers again. Under the covers, the new Sonos Positioning Technology uses high-frequency audio signals to let each compatible speaker sense their distance from each other and a nearby soundbar to switch their roles automatically.

Headphone linking. This feature is unique to the new Sonos Ace Ultra headphones, which can connect to a Sonos home system so you can redirect audio in both directions. “With one tap, you can push and pull sound between out loud and personal listening, sending it to the closest speaker or straight back into your ears,” Sonos explains. This feature uses a secure new Sonos Headphone Engine 2 capability to let the headphones move through your home without relying on Bluetooth.

Sonos27mcp in Early Access. This expansive new extensibility capability lets users connect their Sonos system to any outside AI assistant, including Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, and many others, so they can control music playback using the AI of their choice. It’s built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI to outside applications.

Later this fall, Sonos will add Sonos27voice, the company’s new AI assistant, and Sonos Custom Agents, which will let customers create multiple AI agents, each with its own AI model, personality, and voice, to the platform. Sonos will also add two new app features, Presets—which will let you save a set of speakers, content, and volume so you can return to that configuration easily—and System health views, later this fall too.