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

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.

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 that Bowie album about an adventure in space" and it would know the right album to play, or ask "who won the Super Bowl this year" and receive an up to date answer. 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. If it works as described, that brings Sonos' voice assistant closer to modern AI assistants, or at the very least the Google Assistant and Alexa integration the company has offered on past speakers.

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 (and likely avoid the blowback associated with its disastrous 2024 app redesign). 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.

Sonos

Presets are groupings of music and playback settings you can save and then instantly play from a Sonos device. If you like listening to The Black Parade at full volume in your garage, you can save that as a preset in the Sonos app and start it 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.