Sonos Opens Early Access to Its Natural-Language Voice Assistant on November 6

Sonos 27voice handles conversational requests and general-knowledge questions, and the company is testing it with a small group of US users before a full release in 2027.

By Nakoda News Desk

2 days ago·1 min read

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Sonos 27voice will be available to approved users in the US in early access from November 6.Photo: Engadget

Sonos will open early access to Sonos 27voice, its new voice assistant, on November 6, Engadget reported. The feature arrives in a software update rolling out this week. Users must request access in the Sonos app and be approved, and early access is limited to the US and to English.

The assistant replaces the more limited Voice Control feature. Like Voice Control, it can control playback on Sonos speakers, set timers, run supported smart home devices and give weather updates. According to Sonos' support page, the difference is that Sonos 27voice understands requests phrased in natural language and can answer a much wider range of general-knowledge questions. Sonos' examples include asking it to "play that Bowie album about an adventure in space" and asking "who won the Super Bowl this year" for a current answer. Users can also ask for music by mood or genre and send it to a particular speaker or room.

Sonos 27voice is part of Sonos 27, the new underlying software Sonos announced in September. At that launch the company spoke mostly about support for outside AI assistants such as ChatGPT and for custom agents, and said its own assistant would handle music and mood curation. Sonos 27 runs only on hardware that uses the company's S2 platform.

Sonos says it is testing with a small group before a full release in 2027 so it can gather feedback. Engadget connected the slower rollout to the backlash over Sonos' 2024 app redesign, which damaged customer trust after core features broke or went missing at launch.

The same update adds two features. Presets let users save groups of music and playback settings and start them with one tap. System Health, which is only in the iOS app, shows the status of each speaker and its Wi-Fi network and flags problems.

The launch puts Sonos alongside Amazon, Google and Apple, which are all rebuilding their voice assistants around large language models. Sonos has to show that its own assistant can match those rivals while keeping support for third-party AI.