Sonos' new voice assistant is launching in early access on November 6
The company is hoping to not repeat its previous app redesign debacle.
Sonos has announced that its new voice assistant, Sonos 27voice, will be available to test in early access on November 6. The company is introducing access to the assistant as part of an update rolling out this week. A revamped voice assistant was one of several new features and design tweaks the company planned to include in its new underlying Sonos 27 software.
When it originally introduced Sonos 27 in September, Sonos said its new voice assistant could be used for music and mood curation and mostly focused its attention on its platform's support for third-party AI assistants like ChatGPT and custom agents.
Capabilities and Features
Like the company's previous Voice Control feature, Sonos 27voice can control playback on Sonos devices in your system. It also features basic voice assistant functionality like setting timers, interacting with supported smart home accessories and telling you the current weather. What's different in Sonos 27voice, according to the company's support page, is that it understands and responds to natural language requests and can answer questions about a much broader range of general knowledge. Sonos suggests you could ask it to play a specific album based on a description or ask for up-to-date factual answers. The assistant can also play music based on a mood or genre to a specific speaker or part of your home with just a request, bringing it closer to modern AI assistants.
App Updates and System Health
To try Sonos 27voice you'll have to request early access inside the Sonos app and get approved, according to the company. Sonos says it's testing the feature with a smaller group of users ahead of a full 2027 release to collect feedback. For anyone running Sonos 27 and not interested in voice assistants, the company is also introducing two other new features called Presets and System Health.
Presets are groupings of music and playback settings you can save and then instantly play from a Sonos device with a single tap. System Health is a feature for the iOS version of the Sonos app that can tell you information about your system at a glance, like the connection status of an individual speaker or which Wi-Fi network it's connected to. If part of your speaker setup seems off, Sonos can flag it in System Health so you can fix things.
Sonos 27voice is only available in the US during early access, and only in English. Access to Sonos 27 itself is also limited to hardware that runs on Sonos' S2 platform.
