Today, I’m talking with Tom Conrad, the CEO of Sonos. Tom and I have known each other for a long time — he was the chief technology officer of Pandora, VP of product at Snap, and the chief product officer of Quibi. He was also on the board at Sonos during its disastrous 2024 app redesign that threatened to crash the entire brand.
Tom took over as interim CEO to right the ship during that period, and then took the permanent role just about a year ago. As you’ll hear him say, he thinks Sonos is fully out of that period now, and on to its next chapter with a huge product and platform launch called Sonos 27.
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I mean, come on, you all listen to the show. That is all the most Decoder bait imaginable. I have been dying to have Tom on the show to talk about how the board decided to move on from previous CEO Patrick Spence, how he diagnosed the issues inside the company, and what decisions he made to fix them.
Those fixes involved a lot of big changes: to the company’s structure, its product lineup, and how it thinks about itself and what its product fundamentally is. That’s that new platform, Sonos 27, which you’ll hear Tom call a new foundation for the company that makes every Sonos product work better as part of a system.
There’s a lot here, including how AI assistants can work across the system, the idea of having a mesh network of little computers in your home disguised as speakers, and of course, the testy relationship between Sonos and Google, which means Google’s Gemini assistant isn’t available on Sonos devices.
Oh, and of course we got into the weeds about smart home standards, because I am a smart home nerd and simply cannot help myself. But to his credit, Tom was willing to nerd out with me, and I think this conversation is pretty fun because of it.
Okay: Sonos CEO Tom Conrad. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tom Conrad, you’re the CEO of Sonos. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you. As they say, it’s so great to be here.
I am just going to say, finally, I have been asking you to be on the show for at least a year, if not before. I think the first time I met you was in the back of a car at CES when you were at Pandora.
Sounds right.
One hundred years ago.
One hundred years ago. We were children.
[Laughs] We were little babies. That car was driven by a human driver. That’s how far back it was.
That’s right.
And then you took a turn through Quibi. You and I talked through that, and now you’re at Sonos. As you know, I’m a huge fan of Sonos. We had your predecessor, Patrick Spence, on the show a bunch of times.
Many things have happened, so I just want to start at the very beginning of this. You’re about a year into being the permanent CEO of Sonos. You have a bunch of news to announce. Just tell us what you think Sonos is today. What is your conception of this company?
When I came in the door, one of my earliest observations was that the company behaved like it was 100 percent hardware, but we’re really 100 percent hardware and 100 percent software. And if you get either one of those even a little bit wrong, the impact is tremendous.
So how does that show up really day-to-day? It was about returning the company to the idea that Sonos doesn’t make these individual products, but we really make one thing — we make the Sonos system. It all has to hang together in a cohesive, interesting, and valuable way, or we’re just not doing the work.
There’s been a bunch of basic blocking and tackling, of course, both operationally and in the work that we’re doing in the product family. But at the highest level, returning the company to the idea that we are a system for audio in the home has been the highest-level mantra.
When you say come into the company, do you mean as a board member or as the CEO?
I mean, let’s start the starter pistol in January of 2025, 18 months ago, when I stepped in first as interim CEO and then was lucky enough six months later to be asked to take the job more permanently.
The reason I asked that question is that you obviously have two different views of the company in different roles. We did have former CEO Patrick Spence on several occasions, and he said something very similar to me when he first took over — that Sonos was stuck in its ways. It was really focused on very, very slow iterations of hardware.
He tried very hard to push the metabolism of the company to be much faster, and he talked about that very openly with me. That led eventually to what I think is a moment of true crisis: the app launch. It was a disaster. The system stopped working. That’s when you came in to right the ship.
Tell me about that gap. You came in, and you said this company thinks it’s a hardware company. That’s what your predecessor had been saying, but it went sideways in big, meaningful ways. Tell me about that moment and why you think it was the same conception even when you came in.
So as you describe, I’ve been involved with the company going back almost 20 years. We brought Pandora to Sonos in 2007, I think, and I was able to get to know the company as a partner before I got to know it as a board member. I came onto the board in 2016 right as Patrick became CEO. So from the vantage point of a board member, I got to participate in Patrick’s chapter.
I guess the way I would characterize his high-order thinking about the company in those early days was that, as you described, he wanted to turn the company into a product execution machine with an emphasis on hardware products. We call them NPIs, or new product introductions.
In the chapter before him, it was sometimes years between new Sonos products. Spence said, “Look, we’re going to make a company that knows how to ship a couple of great new products a year.” And he did that. I mean, the company has reliably shipped a couple of great products, hardware products, every year, for close to a decade now.
Sometimes, when you energize an organization around an idea, there are unintended consequences. I think one unintended consequence of that framing was that the company became very focused on the individual products, one at a time. Even as a board member, I received Roam as a portable speaker with a certain amount of battery life, waterproofing, and Bluetooth connectivity. I didn’t really think about it as a member of the Sonos system.
Even with the software work that we did, and with every product that we make, there is a tremendous amount of software effort and innovation that goes into them. But even the software that we made was very focused on the individual NPIs. “What can we do in software to differentiate Move 2 from other speakers in that category?”
What was hard to do, and what was hard to prioritize in the company, was horizontal slices of software experiences that benefited all of the platform. So, in a way, I think some of that debt accumulated, and the company thought that the antidote was to recreate the app experience. And as you know, we made a bunch of mistakes at that moment.
I’m really proud of the fact that I think we’re well beyond that chapter now, but we could have been much more thoughtful about how we qualified that product in the real world. We could have been much more thoughtful about how we rolled it out to customers. We could have, candidly, I think, examined the original impetus in the first place. It was very Sonos-motivated. We wanted to put the app on a modern architecture to make us more nimble.
In my chapter at Sonos, I’m really trying to bring it all back to how we can focus on the customer first. I’m so inspired by talking to people on social media and in my inbox, and people in the industry, like you, about how we show up and solve the real problems that are happening in real households. I’m so excited about the things we’re going to talk to you about today because I think they’re really an answer to many of those questions.
If you’re a listener, you know I’m familiar with Tom. The man’s on Threads doing customer support every day. And actually, I should not take advantage of this. I hold myself back from asking you for direct customer support all the time.
Anytime. The way that you can tell it’s actually me and not our crackerjack social team is that I often will let a Thread die before I should or fail to follow up with someone. So if we were executing perfectly on that, you would know it was fake Tom, but it’s real Tom, and I do it when I can, but sometimes imperfectly.
At least it’s not an AI avatar Tom. That’s when we know it’s going to go sideways.
[Laughs] That’s right.
I know you’re a Decoder fan, so I’m going to make you sit in this for just one more moment because I find all of this to be really fascinating. The app shipped, and the feedback was immediately and intensely negative. Many, many things were broken. Speakers weren’t working at weddings. This is a time of massive crisis.
The company goes to resolve it, but then you’re on the board, and it’s clear that there’s going to be a leadership transition, that Patrick needs to go, and we need a new CEO. You’re going to be the interim CEO.
Tell us about that process. Very, very few people will ever be in that kind of process or get insight into that process. What happened? What were the steps?
Well, I guess you start by saying that the last thing as a board that you want to do is to remove a CEO, particularly one who had as many successes as Patrick had. But I think as we looked at the company’s progress recovering from the app crisis, and frankly the tenor of the conversation inside the company, we just decided that for this kind of step-function improvement we needed on some of these dimensions, we had to make some changes in leadership, and that included a CEO change.
It was a wild experience for me because, I’ll tell you, at no point in the decade leading up to that day in January did I imagine that I might end up the CEO of Sonos. But in the process, the board asked if I’d be willing to step in on an interim basis, and it was an easy yes for me. It’s a cliché, but I’m a customer, and I love this product. There was a Sonos Move in the room when my daughter was born. You talked about weddings. I was watching friends and colleagues on the internet, frustrated by their experience. I wanted to come in and fix it. Of course, as a board member, I felt some real culpability in it. So [I was] thrilled at the chance to come in.
When you’re an interim CEO, the assignment is really to keep the wheels on. The assignment at Sonos specifically was to right the ship. So during the period when the board was doing their comprehensive search for the person that they would ultimately decide was the right choice for the company, it was really easy for me to show up and just do that hard work of trying to get the company back on track.
While I never imagined that I would land in this seat, I feel so blessed that it happened. I do love this job and continue to love the company and the team, and I’m so excited about the things we’re doing for our customers.
Very few people are going to get an interview to become the CEO of Sonos. I imagine at some point you went from being the interim CEO to wanting to become the permanent CEO. What was that process like? Did you write a memo? Was there a pitch deck? What were the steps?
Yeah, so there were a couple of pitch moments that the board asked me, completely reasonably, to engage in the process of applying for the job in the same way that all of the other talented candidates that they spoke to engaged. And so I took a personality test.
Wait, you did?
Yeah.
With the letters?
Oh, yeah.
Like an ENTJ or whatever?
Oh, yeah. One of the letter things, sure. They wanted to know what they were getting.
Do they know that that is basically just like astrology? Someone should tell them.
You know what? Yep, yep. I presented my vision for the company more than once, and I had the incredible advantage of being inside the four walls of the company and deeply understanding what was working and what wasn’t, and the things that we needed to do to get to this next chapter. It was a period of intense, intense work for me and everybody around me at the company, and more than a little anxiety about how it was going to turn out.
It was so fun, though, to get the call and then to just immediately be able to pivot at least a fraction of the work from the entirely tactical to the much more strategic, to begin to talk about what kind of company we are going to build together in this next chapter.
When it was announced that you would become the permanent CEO, even when you were the interim CEO, my reaction was, “Oh, this makes sense.” To use a football analogy, football teams hire defensive head coaches and offensive head coaches, and they come from one side of the ball or the other. It was just obvious: “Oh, this company needs a software CEO, and Tom is a software guy.”
You’re describing a situation where obviously it’s both. You’ve got hardware and software together, but that was the light that went off in my head — “Oh, this is a software person coming in to fix a big software problem.” Is that how you saw it initially?
Yeah, my career started with selling personal computers in 1986 or something, at the original Micro Center. If you’ve ever been to a Micro Center, it’s one of the few remaining big-box retailers for computers. So at the original Micro Center in Columbus, Ohio, at 16 years old, I walked into the CEO’s office and said, “I want to work here.” So from my earliest days, I was sitting with early adopters of personal computers and watching their struggles to understand the technology and put it to use in their lives.
I became an engineer and a product designer out of a desire to help people learn to use these products. And that’s really what’s motivated me through my entire career: how do I help teams make great experiences? So while it’s true that I’m a software person, 35 years in the business, my identity really is as a product designer. And I’d like to think that the board imagined that, yes, they needed a software person, but they needed somebody who could holistically look at the opportunity across hardware and software and help the team get there.
You appear to be through it now. There’s a big stack of announcements here, including MCP integration. I’ve got a lot of questions about all that.
When you became the permanent CEO 18 months ago, you said you immediately shifted strategy. What brought that into focus for you? “Oh, this is actually a software platform with hardware components”? Was that instinct? Was it research? Was it, “I’m getting through this app process, and that is becoming revealed to me”? How did that work?
I think by disposition I’m a fairly right-brained person, and I have this intuitive feeling — creative, or whatever the words are, not as quantitative. But my first job out of college was at Apple, and I think even from the early days when I was there, we talked about the intersection of the arts and humanities and the sciences.
I think one lesson of my career has been that you really do have an obligation to bring both a quant and a qual assessment to most things that pass your desk. So the development of our strategy was very much like that. Yes, there was an intuitive sense about what the right answer for Sonos was that was built up from my experience as a customer by observing our customers and talking to them through the years. A piece of that is a perspective about where the puck is going, of course.
But I do have access to piles and piles and piles of data about how our products behave in the real world, how our customers interact with them, what they use, what they don’t use, and lots of people around me in the organization who can bring that quantitative framing. I think one advantage I had over other CEO candidates was that I could bring some of that horsepower to bear on the story that I shared with the board about my vision for the future of the company.
You’ve made some changes. It’s time for the Decoder questions. You have restructured the company. There have been a few rounds of layoffs. How big is Sonos today?
We’re about 1,500 people.
And how is that structured?
So the company that I stepped into was divided into business units. We had a team that was focused on home. We had a team that was focused on the professional opportunity, a team that was focused on home theater, and so on. While there’s something to be said for P&L responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, there’s something to be said for that approach at a certain scale. I think that my appraisal was that we were sub-scale for the inefficiencies that creep in. We have the almost guaranteed duplication of effort across the silos.
What’s more, if you imagine that the product is really the system, the idea that your portables team sits far away from your home theater team, and sits far away from your plugged-in speakers team, is almost surely going to run counter to the kind of progress that you’re trying to motivate. And so very quickly, within three weeks of my arrival, we reorganized the company into a functional model.
So my leadership team today, of course, has a finance organization, a legal organization, a sales organization, and a marketing organization. But the product team now shows up as represented by hardware, software, and global supply chain operations, so leaders across each of those things. And what that allows us to do is to assemble cross-functional teams, or matrix-style teams, to invest in the initiatives that are of the highest priority to our customers and to the business at any given moment. And we can flex that up and down and side to side as our needs change.
We might, for an interval, be very focused on this part of the portfolio over here, and then we might be able to move to focusing on a different corner of the portfolio. No one has to get a new boss, and people can fluidly move from these things and get new opportunities to learn. It just strikes me as a much more appropriate organizational structure for our current stage.
You’re describing the shift from a divisional structure to a vastly more functional structure.
Yes.
That’s Apple, right?
Yep, sure.
Everyone comes up, and there’s one big product meeting.
You obviously make a lot of software. I’ve described you as a software CEO. It seems like the software industry is in a moment of existential crisis about how software is made, about what a product manager versus an engineer versus a designer do. Are you still in the classic structures of building software? Or has AI completely upended what you’re doing?
No, we’re as deep in this as anyone. What’s been really fun for me over the course of the last year is to watch the software engineering team go from thoughtful skepticism to pretty deep embrace, if I’m honest. Some of that is on the back of just how dramatically the tools have evolved over the course of the last 12 months, certainly.
I think almost everyone in the industry went home at the holidays at the tail end of 2025, coming into 2026, and came back just gobsmacked by how much progress the frontier labs were making on agentic coding, and it’s been a real accelerant for us. As complex as this transition is, I’m really excited about being able to help our engineers navigate what’s a pretty fundamental sea change in the way that this kind of infrastructure gets built, and it’s fun to get to be a part of that at this moment.
Did you break up the classic PM, designer, and engineer triad? Or is that still the core building block?
We still have all three, but it blurs particularly as the designers and the product managers can be prototypers at a really high level with incredible efficiency. It’s exciting to see how quickly they can communicate their ideas now in a medium that just didn’t exist at all for them a year ago.
We’re at the turn, right? You came in, you restructured the company, you identified a new thesis for the company. Today you’re here to talk about all the new news. Do you think you’re through it? Do you think the existing customers have forgiven you for the app mess? Do you think the brand has been restored?
Yeah, as we’ve been saying, I think that there’s the quant and there’s the qual. The quant is green across the board. Performance, reliability, customer care interactions, social tone, NPS — these things are all restored to levels that we enjoyed before any of that happened.
On the qualitative side, I love the fact that I can show up on Reddit or on social media broadly and engage with our customers and have a constructive conversation about things that they’re excited that we’re doing, and things where we’re still disappointing an individual customer on some dimension.
I think that at some level, maybe this game is never over; you’re just always trying to polish off the remaining rough edges of everything that you do. So I have a real critic’s eye when I look at the work that we do, and if I ever let that slip, a customer will remind me of where the work remains. And so, yes, I think in every measurable way it’s behind us, but it’s a “never forget” chapter for the company.
That brings me to the other Decoder question: how do you make decisions? What’s your framework?
Well, I don’t think you bring just one framework to every decision. So we talk about, for example, product decisions. As an idea moves through its lifecycle from its days as an early little sapling that you have to care and tend to, through final mass production for a hardware object, and out into the channels, I think how you think about [each of those] decisions is different.
So in the earliest days, I really tried to protect the creativity of the company and to not let the antibodies of doubt and critique erode an idea before it’s had a chance to express itself in a way that anybody could get excited about. That means creating room for risk-taking, creativity, qualitative assessment, and prototyping before you get to the details of the business case and the hard trade-offs that you make on a journey from an idea to something you can actually ship.
But of course, as the programs roll along and they take on more and more financial investment and organizational risk, as more and more people aggregate into the product, you become, I think, just naturally much more quantitative in your analysis of the decisions. And you ask the teams to bring a really thoughtful, detailed description of the puts and takes and the risks associated with it, and you use that to help you make your decisions.
But maybe on top of all of that, you just have to hire great people. I mean, you just do, and you have to put them on teams that are an appropriate size for the task at hand. I think it’s going to be very, very difficult for any CEO or any leadership team to make great decisions if the people who aren’t bringing the ideas themselves aren’t great. So I suppose it starts with the right people in the seats.
The reason I ask that question in that way is that, I think, the decision you made that is most emblematic to me of changing from a divisional structure with individual P&Ls to a more functional structure, and thinking about the platform as a whole, was the decision to kill a product that I believe was called Pinewood. It was a set-top box that was going to integrate all the streaming services. This was well reported by former Verge reporter Chris Welch, who’s now at Bloomberg.
The thing that really struck me about that was if you had a division that was focused on soundbars, the only place that division could go was to compete with Roku. And all the reporting that we had before suggested that the soundbar division was growing because the attach rate for soundbars with new TVs is 100 percent. Everyone knows the speakers in their TVs are bad.
It’s a great business, and we’re for sure the best product in the category.
So if you want to grow, which is the big thing, you’re going to be like, “How do we grow? And you say, “Well, I got to beat Roku.” And then now you’re just off doing that. You came in, and you just ended that, and I thought, “Oh, this is not just a decision to end a product line; this is also a decision about the strategy of the company. Because if you’re going to go compete with Roku, you’ve got to be a different company.” That’s my view of it. Is that how you saw it?
Like so many things, these decisions do have more than one dimension that you evaluate. A big part of that decision, candidly, was that we were spread too thin across too many things, and I didn’t believe that we could be exceptional at all of them. I wanted to return us to focus on the thing that allows us to be most differentiated in the competitive set, and that’s the incredible systemness of the product, the audio experience that we can deliver, and attending to what, at the time, was a very long list of things that our customers were explicitly asking us for.
I think if we were, putatively, actually working on a set-top box at that moment, another thing that I might have wondered about was whether our desire to make this particular product came from our customer or did it come from some sort of internally sourced sense of business opportunity? And I think companies get in a lot of trouble when the thing that comes first is the model and the thing that comes second is the product.
I certainly feel a sense of obligation to constantly be evaluating new business opportunities for the company, new business models for the company, sure. But I want them to always start from a place of what we really see in the market from customers. I’m not sure that they were saying we want a high-end streaming box that is somehow the love child of an Apple TV and a Roku.
Although that love child… I would be very worried about that love child. Why does this product have 200GB of storage for no identifiable reason, but also shows me ads at all times? We’ll set that aside.
I ask that because I want to talk to you about all the news here. The news here is a bunch of big bets. You’ve got Sonos 27. That is the new name of what you were calling an audio operating system that has something in it called Sonos Fabric.
Boy, I know you know me. I’m ready to go on all these names and all these ideas. In there, somewhere, is MCP support. There’s a big idea about assistants that I want to talk about. You’re cashing some chips, right?
Yeah.
You’re saying, ”Okay, here’s a big new idea. Trust us. We’re going to get it right this time.” You’re ready for it.
Yeah, I feel very ready. We’ve spent the last year building the new products that tell the story of this next chapter of the company. We’re really excited, not just about their capabilities, but how we’re going to share them with the world and how we’re going to enter a period of co-creation with our customers.
We’ve recently done that with some of the app enhancements that we’ve been rolling out. We’ve rolled out a mechanism that allows our customers to opt into them explicitly and talk to us about what they see in their own homes, and it’s just been such a delightful chapter of engagement with the community that I think we really lacked for a while. So yeah, I feel very ready.
Can I talk about it?
Yeah, let’s get into it. Sonos 27 and Sonos Fabric, what are these things? Explain to people what’s going on here.
So 100 percent hardware, 100 percent software. For 20 years, we’ve given all of our hardware objects names: Roam, Arc, Beam, Ace, Era. But we’ve never named the software platform — the thing that takes these collections of products and creates a consistent whole. So in some ways, the big news that we’re sharing right now is that the software platform has a name called Sonos 27, and it has a bunch of promises that it makes to customers in its nuts and bolts.
It’s an ecosystem platform that allows a huge heterogeneous world of services to come together in your home. It’s a system that has a deep technological layer that tunes the audio for every part of your household through a system we call Trueplay. It’s fundamentally built on a kind of fabric that brings all of the products together into a cohesive whole. And architecturally, it’s one of the things that’s really, really unique about what we’re doing.
Our products in your home really find each other on the local network and create something that is truly where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And it’s what unlocks so much of the magical experiences that we’ve delivered through the years. We’re about to announce some exciting new capabilities for Sonos Fabric and point a vector into the future of more to come.
Finally, we have these control and engagement services: app, voice, web. You mentioned MCP, which is a new dimension that we’re adding. We also have an entirely new voice assistant experience. And so we’re doing all of that across the software ecosystem, and we’re even giving a little bit of a preview of a capability that we’re calling Custom Agents, which is multi-tenancy inside of the platform to allow modern voice assistants to live side by side and interact with one another on the platform.
So we’re doing all of that, and we have some great new hardware too. We’ve got a brand new amazing soundbar and an amazing set of new headphones.
The Beam Ultra is the new soundbar, and I think it’s 7.1.2.
Yep.
This is very nerdy, but to me it represents the fact that Atmos is totally mainstream now at this price point.
Yeah, totally.
That might be an entirely different home theater podcast.
I can’t wait for you to hear it, honestly. Obviously, I’m biased and consider the source, but it sounds amazing. People who have heard it just can’t stop talking about how great this little soundbar sounds.
Honestly, I should quit doing this and just do home theater podcasts. Where does my heart truly lie? It’s that. It’s just doing that.
[Laughs] I’m down. Anytime.
We should do it.
If you need a co-host, we should do it.
Look, I just judged the TV shootout, and Sony lost. It’s a big deal. There’s a lot going on in that world.
Tell me about the idea of naming the operating system Sonos 27. It’s obviously the middle of 2026. It obviously tracks Apple’s naming scheme. This very much implies there’ll be a Sonos 28 one year from now, in August of 2027.
It does. I think from the beginning we knew that we wanted to give it a name, and we knew that we wanted the name to be able to express this idea that Sonos does evolve. And for many, many years, that evolution was to the great benefit of our customers. We had lossless audio for Apple. We had high-fidelity audio for Spotify. We had AirPlay. We had Alexa.
Through the years, we’ve just over and over and over again expanded the capability of the products that were already in our customers’ homes, and we didn’t have a way of talking about it at all. So we wanted to give it a name. We wanted people to understand that it improved over time.
So as we started thinking about, “Well, how do you really do that?” I mean, the first thing they came to was like, “Gosh, we already have ‘OS’ right in the name of the company.” So to try to brand some entirely new thing felt like a self-own, and so we pretty quickly reverted to this idea that the product is 100 percent hardware and 100 percent software. The product is Sonos, not Arc. Maybe the OS2 is called Sonos.
And then it’s like, “Well, what companion moniker can we give it to drive that idea home?” Obviously we talked about version numbers and any number of other things, but we decided that we’d like to take advantage of this. Once a year, we’ll stand up in front of our audience and tell them about how the platform is evolving, and using the year as a descriptor for that was a better mechanism than almost anything else that was available to us.
Those software cycles, yearly big releases… Apple is basically the only company that sticks to it. Even if it doesn’t do it, it announces all the features, and then they slowly dribble them out over the course of the year as they come into focus.
Again, I have a lot of questions about the nature of software development in 2027, but the idea that there’s one monolithic release once a year — the industry’s gotten away from that. Is that your idea, or are you going to do something different?
No, no, no. Fortunately, the industry has gotten away from that, and our intention is to have a moment where we can tell the story of the operating system roadmap for the next six or 10 months. As you’ll see, even in this moment, the things that we’re announcing — many of them will be available in what we’re calling early access, which is the chance for us to put them out into the product as opt-ins for our customers. That way, we can do the perspective collecting, real-world data collecting sort of work. All of these products will continue to evolve through the year.
Frankly, I think as we go into the event, we will talk about all of this. I know that I’m going to get questions from customers and observers like, “What about this feature?” I think really the answer is just going to be like, “We know the stuff.” There’s very little that you can say, “Hey, someone should do this,” that isn’t on our list.
So to be able to say, “Look, part of what we’re communicating with the 27 of it all is that this stuff will come in 2027, and if it doesn’t, it’ll come in 2028 or beyond.”
One of the big ideas here is obviously that this is an operating system that addresses a bunch of hardware in your home. That thing mostly looks like speakers, but some of it is connected to your TVs. You’ve got command and control. You’ve got other assistants, which I want to talk about, and that operating system should gain more capabilities over time.
What does the far version of that look like? Is it just that there will be an ambient assistant in your house that is addressing the fabric through MCP? Is it that you’ll interoperate with other speakers that might be in the house? What does the biggest vision of this look like?
I mean, I think in some ways you’ll have to stay tuned to see where we take this, but I’ll start with this: I think that every home deserves this infrastructure. I think sound is an incredible mood stabilizer, if you like. Take the audio track out of your favorite movie or television show, and so much of the life comes out of it. And I think having an out-loud audio experience in your home is something that everybody should enjoy. So part of the big picture is we want to spread this far and wide and make it accessible to everyone.
A running joke about the first generation of assistants is that they’ve ended up being for timers. I think you really do, when you’re building out this next generation of voice-centric experiences, have to look at not just what the technology can do, but also what the customer wants. And one of the new capabilities in Sonos 27 is our new voice assistant.
Our voice assistant is built on modern generative technology, but it’s really inspired by what people tell us that they like to see in the home. I’ll tell you, the killer app of the assistant is that they just want to be able to talk to it like a normal person, full stop. With the first-generation assistants, you just had to guess what to say every time, and even then maybe it took two or three attempts to get there.
It’s such a game changer to be able to say, “Play that album I loved in college, the one with the Cocteau Twins singer. I think the song ended up as the theme song for that show. It was on Fox. It was about the curmudgeonly Doctor House… It’s ‘Teardrop’ by Massive Attack.”
I know. They took it off the [streaming version of House]. It’s sad.
It is. It is. So that’s job one, if you like. The first-generation assistants didn’t do it at all. Sonos Voice in the new OS is exceptional at this. So that’s meeting the customer where they are.
What else should they say? Well, they say a little bit about what I would call mood and ambiance. So lighting. Let’s bring lighting into the environment so that you can express a scene through both sound and light.
My wife and I are constantly settling little bets in the kitchen: “What was this thing called? Who is that actor?” They do want comprehensive world knowledge. They want to get an answer to the kid’s homework assignment or whatever, and so these agents do need to be able to hand off to comprehensive frontier models to get perspectives on the world.
In some instances, those perspectives allow them to use the frontier model to manipulate the audio environment to play some music that people are talking about on TikTok and pick some stuff that sounds like the shoegaze music that I liked when I was in college. We can leverage the power of a frontier model to understand what’s being talked about on TikTok to sort that against my musical preferences, and deliver it.
I guess while we’re enumerating what I think a modern voice assistant has to do, it has to be fast, it has to be reliable, and it has to be responsible and affordable to run. I do think that customers want this as a fundamental capability of a product like Sonos, and we built an architecture that allows us to deliver it to every one of our customers as well.
There’s a lot of big Decoder, big Verge ideas in all of there, all the way down to where does the compute live? Where is the computer in your house supposed to be? You’re describing a lot of command and control. There’s integration with smart home stuff. I think it’s a Lutron partnership you have now.
That’s right.
But there’s an infinite number of smart light switches that might help you control your lighting. Your company is part of the Matter standard, but you don’t actually enable Matter on Sonos speakers. I think our reporting from the wonderful Jenn Tuohy, as our smart home reporter, has suggested that you don’t think it’s ready.
This is a lot of stacked problems. I’m just going to read your press release to you. It says, “Sonos 27 MCP allows you to connect any outside AI assistant or agent to your system, including ChatGPT.”
Well, I’m a customer, and I’ll tell you that the one that I want to use is Gemini for Home, Google’s assistant, and that’s been broken on Sonos for ages because of an ongoing lawsuit. Is that fixed? Is Google on your list? Because there’s a lot of competitive dimension here.
So in many ways we have a strong relationship with Google to this day, despite the lawsuit. YouTube Music is one of the most-listened-to music services on the platform. We do have a long history of a first-generation Google Assistant on many of our products. We’d love to continue to work with them on all of these things, and those conversations continue.
I guess I’m just going to push on this idea of connecting any AI assistant or agent. There are two big ones. There’s Alexa, and there’s Google. You might be in third place. Siri exists. Those are the ones, right? Maybe there’s going to be a ChatGPT product in the future.
Well, listen. I want to tease apart two different things.
Sure.
Let’s talk about command and control of the Sonos system through external agentic interfaces, just to use every buzzword. What I really mean is that we think there’s a lot of utility in showing up inside of ChatGPT on the web, on your phone, on the desktop in the same way that Slack or your calendar shows up in those environments.
So with Sonos 27 MCP, we’ll show up in the directory of connectable services in all of those environments: in Gemini, in Claude, in ChatGPT, in Grok. By connecting that tool into your experience, however you access it, you’ll be able to summon Sonos. So maybe you’re working on something, and you want some music to play; you can just tell Claude to make it play or just tell Gemini to make it play from the desktop or mobile surface that you’re sitting in front of.
That’s a pretty powerful building block as we see these OpenClaw-style agentic, proactive, asynchronous agents evolve. Now they have access to Sonos in a supportable way. There’s been a bunch of hack MCPs and CLIs for Sonos around, and a lot of reporting about how they’re among the most utilized examples for these things. We’re excited to officially support such a thing. As much as fun it is to see the mainstream use cases, I’m very excited to see what hobbyists are going to do with Sonos MCP.
So let’s now talk about on-device, though. So we’ve been working closely with Amazon for some time to bring Alexa Plus to our platform. That work continues. I’m excited about it. We don’t have anything to announce today, but we’ve had a long and really successful relationship with Amazon through the years. Panos was on the board with me for many of our years at Sonos.
By the way, just so people know, that’s Panos Panay, who now runs hardware and Alexa at Amazon.
That’s right, that’s right. He’s a friend of the show.
Yes. Panos and I are buds.
But one thing we’ve demonstrated is something we call Sonos Custom Agents, which lets you take any of these inference engines — the Anthropic engine, the OpenAI engine, the Gemini engine, the Grok engine — and invoke it from Sonos. You’ll be able to give it a unique voice, give it a name, and give it a context that has it show up in a particular way.
So imagine that you’d like to have a personality that lives inside of Sonos, and it’s the John Cusack character from High Fidelity, an opinionated record store geek who is interested in subtly shading your perspectives in music, but also making recommendations.
You’ll be able to go in and set up a custom agent in Sonos that says, “Let’s use OpenAI inference. Let’s use this voice I pick, and let’s give it this personality, and let’s have it live alongside an agent that’s powered by Anthropic inference that is going to give me advice on cooking. And let’s do another one that is only interested in connecting me with opportunities to see live music.”
All of these tools will be able to show up inside of Sonos, invoked by the name you give it, like, “Hey, Sonos, connect me to the curator,” and talk to you only about that topic, have a point of view, and be able to access the Sonos context so that they can hand off from one to the other.
It’s super fun. It’s super creative. It lets our customers become participants in the Sonos platform. We’re just showing it off as a technology preview because there are still a lot of details to work out here, but it’s a lot of fun to play with in the lab.
Let me bring some of these ideas together. There’s the idea that there’s external command and control. I have an Echo Dot, and I say, “Turn on the Sonos,” and it just does that.
Then there’s the idea that there’s the assistant that lives on your device that is either the Sonos voice assistant or maybe you’re going to keep working with Amazon and Alexa+ being there. And then we’re going to make new custom ones out of building blocks that are enabled in lots of different ways.
When I asked where the computer is, this is, to me, the big question: where does all this ambient agentic AI actually live? Where does it have control? Is it going to happen locally? Are we sending everything to the cloud?
Somewhere in your home, if you’re going to control lights, music, and everything else, there needs to be some logic happening in your home. There are a lot of standards to do that. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Some of them have names that connect directly to the word fabric, like Thread.
Sure.
There’s a lot going on here in terms of just the names and schemes of what could happen. Where do you see this view? Who is your competition here?
Is it that Apple is going to launch a new HomePod with an AI-enabled Siri, and they already have a HomeKit, which is a pretty well-built and pretty popular smart home platform? Is it, “Well, OpenAI is going to have a hardware device, and maybe their first one’s going to be in the home, and you need to stave that off and make sure people are talking directly to you, and you have the customer relationship”?
That seems not only undeveloped, but even the foundations of how you build the products — like Matter and smart home standards — are messy and political in very specific ways. So how do you see the competition, victory, and success there? And then how do you solve just the capability gap that every other company has run into?
So one thing that I’m reminded of in this moment is that we, as an industry, have these platform shifts that unlock opportunities for companies who get lucky on timing. For example, the original dot-com era was really powered by Oracle and Sun Solaris boxes and data centers that you owned and operated yourself. We then went through a chapter where the infrastructure became Linux and open source for your data tier.
Of course, we’ve had this huge long run of cloud infrastructure. I think that if you’re a company that builds your stack on Solaris and Oracle, it’s really that there’s an opportunity for a company to come along and build a stack on Linux and Postgres in that moment and suddenly find efficiencies that are very, very hard for you to claim.
I think something very similar is happening in voice assistants. When I hear you talk on the show about your experience with voice assistants that are going through the transition from first generation to second generation, it feels to me like so much of the challenge there is about how we drag along all of the committed relationships that we have for the internet-connected toaster, back massager, and all of the things that are connected into those existing historical ecosystems.
Honestly, even in the world of AI, with just how much has changed in the last couple of years underneath the companies as they’re building out their answers here, it really feels to me like we are stepping into a moment where agentic tool use powered by protocols, like MCP, is going to disintermediate a lot of that stuff that you’re talking about.
I think that in the immediate term, we’re really excited about what we can do in the use cases that our customers are telling us they care about. Give me mood and audio in the home. We have great solutions for that today. And I think we can take advantage of this shift to a truly next-generation architecture without the baggage of a decade of internet-connected light switches from 17 different protocols with 17 different hubs in the closet.
Well, I mean, part of the opportunity there is that you don’t have a big voice assistant. I don’t think the current Sonos voice assistant is at the scale of Alexa or Google Assistant. I’m just guessing. They do have that problem. The light switches in my house, they’re in the walls. They’re going to be there. That Lutron hub is there. It’s not great. However, Lutron is the best one.
It is. It is the best one.
There’s a box in my house, and there are a lot of those little weird little boxes in my house because I have a smart home, and all of those dependencies exist for those platforms for reasons. If you show up and say, “Use my voice assistant instead,” and it can’t operate all of the lights, well, I’m just going to fall back to Amazon, or I’m going to fall back to Google. They know it, and they know they can’t break those things. Panos and I have talked about it a lot, actually in the context of Alexa Plus.
The promise of AI, at least from my very abstract vantage point, is, boy, I should not care about any of this. There’s a network in my house. There are lots of devices on that network. They have some access points on that network, and maybe they’re API-driven access points, maybe they’re MCP-driven. It should not matter. There’s just a bunch of devices in my network that you can control somehow, and this all-seeing robot that is going to replace every job in America should be able to traverse my network and turn on the lights without any help. That’s what it should do.
Some of the very first big vibe coding shockwaves were AI researchers, bleeding-edge AI researchers, being like, “I figured out how to control my shades. They walked through my network, and the shades go up and down now,” right? We’re not there at the consumer level. The promise is not there. I’m still here talking to you about Matter, Thread, HomeKit, and whether or not Google Assistant can control my Sonos Amp, which, by the way, it can’t, and that is my one ticket to you that I didn’t submit on Threads.
That’s the promise, but the gap to that seems really, really huge. Are you able to close it? Is that the opportunity?
I think we’re just still in the Apple II days of the home automation space. So while there is, as you point out, this incredible, wild, heterogeneous world of different light switch controllers, I think when you talk to mainstream consumers about their homes, they’re not there yet.
I do think that because of the profound technological step function of agentic control of these kinds of services and things like tool use, as the consumer catches up with the industry’s ambition to solve these problems, new technological solutions will emerge. I’m really excited about how we’re positioned to ride that transition and not be encumbered by the decade of early adopter internet-connected light switches.
What are you going to do about the light switches that are already in the walls?
I just don’t think that there’s enough of them to matter in the final answer. Of course, Lutron’s a great partner, and they do a great job with this.
They do. I mean, we have them. We’ve got all kinds of light switches. We mostly have Lutron ones. But that’s my question. The first natural customer for something like what you’re describing is somebody who is already using these products in some way. If you show up to my house and there’s no Matter support or whatever, I’m like, “Well, I can’t use it.”
Is it though, or is it more like the difference between the people that were adopting Creative Labs MP3 players before the iPod came along?
Sure.
Was the iPod really for those people, or was it for people that had that problem but were nowhere near the people that had been early adopters? Or was the iPhone for people that were using Windows CE, or was it for people that were using flip phones who were ready for the transition? I think we’re making-
Is that the idea here “iPhone for smart home control” or “iPhone for audio in the home”?
That’s right.
The turn there that I think is really interesting is: who are you going to talk to? Where is the computer? What is the computer? You’re describing a situation where if you want music, you’re going to talk to Sonos. But you also have a general-purpose assistant like Claude or ChatGPT, and they can talk to Sonos, too.
It’s unclear to me — and it may be one of the most fascinating questions at this moment in tech — where the interface goes. Are we all going to have one chatbot that does everything, and all the demand is aggregated there, and OpenAI becomes more powerful than ever? Or are we going to have lots and lots of assistants that we address in lots and lots of different ways?
It seems like your bet is Sonos will have a personality in your home, maybe multiple personalities in your home, and customers will address that, and all the other stuff will go somewhere else.
For 20 years, we’ve found a lot of success around the idea of embracing every dimension of the problem. Yes, there’s an app, but you’re welcome to engage with us through AirPlay or Spotify Connect. Yes, we have a voice assistant that lives side by side with Alexa. Yes, we have proprietary mesh, but it integrates with Bluetooth and even line-in. I think we bet that we’re of a size and scale that allows us to both be nimble and react to these changes, but also have enough horsepower to keep up technologically with what the best in the category are doing. So I think some of this just plays out on the field.
Just one last idea, since you said it a couple of times, this question about where the compute lives. I think one incredibly powerful opportunity for Sonos is that we do place compute in millions and millions of homes. People don’t think of them as computers often, but they are. They create a seamless experience that is really the integration of a set of cloud services and local services in a way that looks like just one surface area to the customer.
I think that the answer to your questions, “Does this live in the cloud? Does this live in the home? Does this live in a box?” is yes. I think we’re pretty uniquely situated to take advantage of an architecture where it’s not cloud-only, it’s not home-only, but it’s an integrated system that combines all of that together. And at the end of the day, that is what Sonos 27 is.
Just to make that really reductive, when I say “where is the computer” in the home context, what I mean is maybe in the ’90s to early 2000s, there was a vision that we would all have home servers in our basements, and they would do all the logic of our home. They would have all the storage, and Microsoft would sell you a Windows home server in the basement and a Windows Media Center in the living room, and you and I probably both watched all of those Bill Gates keynotes at CES.
None of that really ever came to pass. Instead, we put a lot of cheap computers near all the TVs, and they connected to cloud services, and they’re basically just running web browsers, as you well know. That is a very different version of what needed to happen and how the market played out.
In the smart home, I’ve got a bunch of automations in my house. When the garage is open, the lights turn on, and other stuff happens. At night, the doors all lock if they’re not locked. That logic has to live somewhere. My perspective on it is that it should live in my house. If the internet goes down, the lights should still turn on.
This is not anything to do with big AI integrations or the new MCP way to address the Sonos system. Those are big ideas, and I’m just insistently dragging you back down into the dirt of: if the internet goes out, are the lights still going to turn on?
You don’t want to be the partner that puts in the internet-connected light switches that don’t work when the internet is down.
But it’s not just the internet-connected light switches; it’s the logic of making it all work together.
I understand. Yeah, fair. Here’s what I’ll say about that. For 40 years now, we’ve been talking about technology for the home, starting with the personal computer, which is supposed to be the center of the technological household, but we didn’t really get that. We got laptops that people mostly use at work and use a bit at home.
Then we got mobile, and mobile is supposed to be the thing that you engage with when you leave your house on your way to work. Of course, the fundamental media of mobile is so addicting that it’s all-consuming. We use it at work, we use it at home — we use it all the time. But my observation about our use of it in the home is that nobody loves it. No spouse has ever said, “I wish my husband was on his phone more. I wish my kid used their iPad more,” and so we’re looking for ways to get beyond that.
To your point, the other compute that’s in the home, like I said, is the set-top box, which is largely just a web browser to a bunch of services that live in the cloud. I think it’s pretty interesting, actually, that in 17 million homes Sonos is an actual mesh of compute in your house with real horsepower, real memory, real CPU, real capability, a real operating system — all just waiting to be the container for some of the kinds of things you’re talking about. So it’s super interesting. We’ll figure it out over time.
I feel like you’re this close to being like, “And then the Teslas will be a data center.” There’s something there that is maybe the line. Actually, I want to talk about that. I actually want to push on that a little bit.
The initial Sonos innovation 100 years ago, when the company started, was, “Oh, we can build a mesh network. We can do wireless audio at scale. We can synchronize the latency of all the speakers so it sounds like the same music playing at the same time.” This was a lot of big engineering back in the day.
Still, I mean, candidly, still. A lot of what our software team does day in and day out is extend and maintain that infrastructure.
There are features you’re announcing here as part of Sonos Fabric that I think are interesting. If you have surrounds, you can just place them, and they’ll figure out that they’re surrounds and immediately start being the surround speakers in a home theater.
There’s just a lot of potential, as you’re describing, in the notion that, “Oh, there’s a big network of small computers in my house that can come together and do things you would not expect.” Is your focus that they will always do audio things? Or is it the focus that they will have many more capabilities?
I think any thoughtful product leader is going to tell you the focus is an important part of success. I do feel like there’s so much interesting work for us to do around creating an audio system that sets the mood for your home that I don’t want us to take our eye off of that opportunity. We are doing some really exciting things in Sonos Fabric and Sonos 27 that we should talk about, that get to some of the work that you’re describing.
But certainly in the moments where you allow yourself to think about what the company is in five years and what it will be in 10 years, you can’t help but interrogate what the opportunity is for a mesh — a fabric of compute that lives in the home.
I want to end by talking about headphones really quickly. We just had the CEO of Bose on. She and I had a pretty searching conversation about what happens to the headphone market in the time of AI wearables.
My fear, my anxiety, about audio is always that consumers will always pick convenience over quality. It’s just the history of the… I’ve got a set of AirPods on this desk, and they don’t sound great, but boy, are they convenient. And that’s just the way it goes. It has always been what the market has demanded: convenience over quality.
We’re going to enter a time when Apple puts cameras on AirPods, and you can talk to them with Siri. When Google and Samsung ship very similar products, there’s undoubtedly going to be a flood of AI hardware startups that want to put something in your ears or in your body in some way.
You are in the headphone market. You’re talking a lot about AI; you’re talking a lot about Fabric. That seems like a cataclysm coming for headphones. The same way that the removal of the headphone jack was a cataclysm in the headphone market, this seems like the next one.
How are you preparing for that? Do you think there’s going to be a range of voice assistants on headphones, or do you think what you would call the first-party vendors are going to just grab more and more of that share?
Before we jump to the hypotheticals about where headphones are, can I tell you a little bit about the new headphones?
Yeah, of course.
All right. So one of the things that you get from entering a new market is the opportunity to build something and put it in customers’ homes and learn a lot about what matters and what doesn’t matter.
So we launched Sonos Ace two years ago. I think measured against any of the other premium over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones in the market, they’re a great product. They’ve got great reviews; they have great noise cancelling. They’re super comfortable, and they look great. We’re really proud of the product, but they weren’t thoughtfully integrated into the Sonos ecosystem.
I mean, at launch you could swap to one of our soundbars, not even all of our soundbars. I think it was the most visible expression of the missed opportunity of that moment for the company to always remember that the products that we make are part of the Sonos system, not individual offerings.
So we ended up with a great pair of headphones, but honestly, I mean, you review them all the time; there are lots of great headphones. When we set out to take all the lessons that we learned from Ace to design Ace Ultra, at the very top of that list is that we have to do the hard thing. These headphones have to be able to show up in your home as a part of the system, and the model through which you invoke your headphones has to be completely seamless and delightful.
We built an entirely new hardware platform for Ace Ultra called Headphone Engine 2, and it unlocks this capability at the hardware level. And then in Sonos OS 27, we built virtualization so that any one of the speakers in your home can deliver the audio platform to that speaker but can also act as a proxy for your headphones, which don’t have the horsepower to run the full stack — it would kill battery life, et cetera.
Now with Ace Ultra, you’ll be able to link your headphones to your Sonos system, walk up to a speaker that’s playing, press a button on your headphones, and the music will jump from the speaker into your headphones. No Bluetooth, no phone. You’ll be able to walk around your whole house, enjoy the music, come to another speaker, press the button again, and it will jump to that speaker using some BLA location-sensing stuff that we’ve developed. It’s super magical. It’s the one job that we had and didn’t deliver on with Ace. We’re really excited to get it out into the market.
Analogous to that on the home theater side is, as you mentioned, that we’re making all of our portable speakers — Sonos Play, Sonos Move — capable of being rear channels for home theater. That sounds really easy. Maybe people will even be like, “Why wasn’t that always possible?” But to your point about the deep technology of it, the way that we achieve high-fidelity, low-latency surround experiences in the living room is by directly bonding our rear channel speakers and subwoofer to the soundbar on a proprietary network, not through your access point. So for a speaker to seamlessly hop between being part of your Sonos system as a music node and part of your Sonos system as a surround channel means that you have to do a real-time reconfiguration of that networking stack, and you have to know when to do it.
We’re using accelerometers in the product to actually know that you’ve picked it up and set it down in a new location. We’re using Sonos’ positioning system, which is ultrasonic signaling, to broadcast to the room, “Hey, is there a soundbar here?” Ultrasonic comes back saying, “I’m here.” They negotiate position, left and right, and distance, so that they can optimize the surround sound experience. You pick it up again, you take it back to the kitchen, and it’s a regular speaker again. All happens magically, no use of the app. It’s pretty cool.
Answer my question on headphones, though. This is my big worry. You’ve got really cool headphones. They have a feature that no one else can ship, and Apple’s going to say, “Look, our new AirPods have Siri AI in them.”
You can just say, “Show me what I’m looking at,” and a picture will be taken automatically and something will happen. We’ll get over the privacy implications of that, but that’s a collapse of the headphone market.
Maybe. I mean, headphones come in all kinds of form factors today: over-ear, in-ear, cuffs, wireless, wired. So I do think it’s a market where people choose different form factors for different tasks. We’re really focused on this personal in-the-home listening — what do you do when the baby’s asleep? What do you do when you want to move the party from the kitchen to the den while you relax for the evening? We think that there’s a bunch of really interesting use cases there that other people aren’t paying attention to.
I think, broadly, over the course of the next couple of years, we’re going to get all kinds of adventurous wackadoodle consumer electronics that are connected to this new emerging AI universe. Most of them will be a swing and a miss. Of course, we’ve already seen some of those. So it’s a little hard to speculate, I think, about which of these things, if any, is going to have its iPod moment or its iPhone moment or whatever.
What do you think is going to happen?
I think we’re going to see a replay of what happened when the headphone jack got taken away. The headphone jack was an open interconnect. There was a really vibrant market for all kinds of headphones, and a bunch of those companies don’t exist anymore. The high-end wired headphones, for phones anyway, have mostly gone away, and you have a bunch of medium Bluetooth competitors, but the phone makers have largely taken that with first-party products.
Now, you have your products at the high end competing with really high-end noise-canceling products from Bose and Sony and whoever, and that is the airplane set. The lack of the open interconnect has really killed the vibrancy of the low and middle end of the market.
Okay, well, there’s one big thing they can do to make sure the high end belongs to them, and it’s to integrate AI in very specific ways directly into their operating system. We’ll see how that plays out. There’s also a thing that’s different this time: there’s a vastly more energized European regulatory environment. Who knows how this will play out?
Sure.
I can’t tell you, but all that stuff is a swirl, and you’re a headphone maker, and it seems like different headphone makers are taking different approaches to this.
The only counter that I might offer is that there’s a lot of talk about the walled garden of the Bluetooth advantages that the platform companies have. But I would say even without the European regulators, it’s notable that something like the Meta Glasses can have a reasonable, I think, commercially viable set of experiences that are principally powered by compute that lives on your phone and still deliver conversational AI that is mediated by a Bluetooth connection, admittedly behind some of the obstacles that you’re describing. But those obstacles aren’t so profound that clever companies aren’t figuring out how to work within those constraints.
I’m very curious to see how that plays out. It doesn’t seem like it’s in focus. Again, probably because, as you say, none of the products are in focus. No one knows what a hit product here looks like, so you might as well let a thousand flowers bloom and then radically constrict the market.
Yeah, sure.
Tom, I’ve burned just a ton of your time. I think you can tell I could talk to you for ages and ages about all kinds of things.
Super fun.
Tell us what’s next for Sonos. When does all this stuff ship?
So I think by the time this airs, we’ll have announced all of this to the world. We’re having a big event in New York to share Sonos OS 27, Sonos Voice 27, and the Ace Ultra and Beam Ultra. We can’t wait to get this stuff out into the world and begin to hear what our customers do with all of these exciting new products.
Many of the software features are going to be available in early access, which will mean our customers will opt into them, be able to give us feedback, and we’ll be able to observe the telemetry that comes back from their homes and make sure that we’re delivering exactly the experience that we want. We’re excited about the moment of co-creation that’s around the corner for us.
As we talked about at the top of the hour, Sonos 27 is absolutely a nod to the fact that we intend to keep doing this until the sun burns out. There’ll be Sonos 28 and 29 and 30 and beyond.
That’s great. All right, I’ve got to ask you at the end: I have ceiling speakers in my kitchen. They’re connected to a Sonos Amp. There’s a Google Home Hub right there, and it’s broken. I can’t ask it to play music in the kitchen. When are you going to fix that for me? I’m ending on tech support.
All right. I don’t know the answer, but I’d love to figure it out for you. I know the right folks to call, so let’s get you connected.
We’re going to have a Decoder roundtable.
If your listeners have similar kinds of problems, we’ve got great people to help them, and we always like to hear from you. You can find me on social pretty easily.
Usually I end by inviting people back, but I’m saying we’ve got to fix it, and then we’re going to talk about what it took to fix it. That’s the plan.
All right. Right on.
Tom, this is great. Thank you so much, man.
This was super fun. Thank you.
Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
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