Jada Jones/ZDNETSonos has spent the majority of 2026 gently preparing us for a major comeback. The company used the Sonos Play and gradual release of app redesigns as a stepping stone for what’s next. I flew to New York City to get a first look at what’s coming this fall — here’s what to know.
On the hardware front, Sonos unveiled the Sonos Ace Ultra headphones and the Beam Ultra soundbar, both of which arrive with upgraded audio components. At the center of the announcement is an AI-powered facelift for its S2 platform, which pulls your Sonos system together.
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In fact, the new hardware seems inconsequential despite tangible audio upgrades. What’s more interesting are the new ways in which the hardware can interact with the Sonos system.
What Sonos’s announcements prove is that while it’s necessary to continue polishing audio performance, what’s more important now is making your Sonos speakers smarter — smarter in a way that can distinguish them from speakers with Alexa, Gemini, and potentially Siri AI as their lifeblood.
AI that differs from industry heavyweights
Sonos’s in-house voice assistant has been notoriously basic, only offering simple on-device controls and minimal task assistance, such as weather reports and timers. The new Sonos 27 operating system brings deeper AI integration, with the option to create custom agents for your system or call on your favorite chatbot, such as ChatGPT, to complete commands.
Sonos 27 also delivers a reborn Sonos Voice Assistant, now dubbed Sonos 27voice, built specifically for music discovery and curation. Sonos’s decision to move its voice assistant command processing from on-device to the cloud enables contextual and conversational queries, letting you talk to your speaker as you would to another person.
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Sonos 27mcp enables open AI-to-application integration, granting models from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini permission to live inside your Sonos speakers. This open approach allows users to converse with any MCP-compatible model, which is ideal for those who may have negative feelings about a specific model while favoring another.
On the horizon is Sonos Custom Agents, which uses Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini APIs to give personality, for lack of a better word, to a profile you create that’s attached to a specific Sonos speaker within your system.
Your custom agent could be a chef with a cartoonish French accent who resides on your kitchen counter’s Era 100 and helps you cook, or could be a music buff inside of your listening room’s Era 300 that relays behind-the-scenes fun facts from your favorite albums. What your agent does and how it behaves is up to you. This feature is still in development, and Sonos plans to release it in 2027.
Headphones as part of the system
The first-gen Sonos Ace headphones, though great Bluetooth headphones, were treated as more of the Cinderella of Sonos’s system, and less of a full-blooded part of the family. Headphone linking between the Ace Ultra and a nearby Sonos speaker uses the headphones’ built-in Wi-Fi for higher-resolution streaming, and you can stream music directly from the Sonos app to the Ace Ultra headphones.
Headphone linking enables a “push and pull” of audio from the Ace Ultra to your system’s speakers, and vice versa. Sonos’s demo imagined playing music from two Sonos Five speakers in a bedroom, pressing the Ace Ultra’s Content Key to pull music from the speakers to the headphones, then moving to the living room and pressing the Content Key to push music from the headphones to the Beam Ultra.
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Sonos used the phrase “it’s not magic, but it’s not not magic,” in reference to this feature specifically. Though it’s very cool, and I’m glad Sonos is thinking of ways to link its headphones to its speakers, I’m on the fence about this feature’s utility, and am hesitant to say it’s the coolest thing about the Ace Ultra. I’ll have to revisit my feelings about it after further testing.
You can think of the Ace Ultra’s Wi-Fi/Bluetooth hybrid connectivities in the same way the portable speakers use these two protocols: When you’re at home, the Ace Ultra is part of the system, and Wi-Fi is the preferred protocol. When you leave the house, you’ll have to rely on Bluetooth.
One potential drawback is that the Ace Ultra is not compatible with Sonos 27voice, so you can’t control linked smart home products, discover music, or inquire about the music you’re currently listening to while wearing the headphones.
Sonos confirmed to me that when the Ace Ultra is connected to the system, the microphones of nearby speakers are disabled, so there’s no opportunity to accidentally trigger them with a wake word.
More use from portables
Presence sensing is central to ensuring smart home products run smoothly in the background of your life at home, and Sonos achieves this through Sonos Fabric. Sonos applies this philosophy to its portables — Sonos Ace Ultra, Move 2, and Play.
Sonos Fabric is responsible for seamlessly switching audio from the Ace Ultra to a nearby speaker. Instead of manually selecting in the app which speaker the headphones should connect to, Sonos Fabric can detect which speaker you intend to switch audio to and from, with no app fiddling needed.
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Sonos Fabric also unlocks additional utility from compatible portable speakers, allowing them to serve as rear speakers in your home theater when they’re brought within range of your soundbar. If you have two Move 2 or Play speakers, you can set them up as rear speakers without locking them into a home theater configuration.
I listened to two Play speakers paired with the Beam Ultra, and it was immediately apparent how they enhanced the viewing experience. I found this feature, given its flexibility for the Play’s indoor/outdoor use and its independence from a home theater system, much more attractive than the headphone linking feature.
Honorable mention: app upgrades
In June, Sonos announced that the app would receive several design and user experience changes throughout the year, including improved volume control and UI conformity. During the demo, Sonos showed off the app optimized for iPad, Live Activities for iOS, a new volume control feature, and upcoming widget customization for Android.
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Aside from a more responsive volume scrubber, which is already publicly available, Sonos showed off another way to control your system’s volume. With the app open, you can use two fingers to touch your screen and twist them clockwise to increase volume or counterclockwise to decrease it, as if you’re turning a knob.
You can use any two fingers, as close together or far apart as you’d like, anywhere on the screen to summon the digital dial. It struck me as one of those features that seems gimmicky, but eventually grows on you and becomes your most-used app feature.
