How Sonos rebooted itself

My guest today is Sonos CEO Tom Conrad. Tom was on the board at Sonos during the disastrous 2024 app redesign that threatened to crash the entire brand, and he took over as interim CEO to right the ship during that period. About a year ago, he took the permanent role. 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. Plus. Tom was willing to get into the weeds and nerd out with me, and I think this one is pretty fun because of it. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: After two years of turmoil, Sonos attempts a triumphant return | The Verge How Sonos’ Tom Conrad Is reshaping the brand after app disaster | Bloomberg An in-depth interview with Sonos interim CEO Tom Conrad | The Verge (2025) Sonos’ smart assistant is expanding from music to home control | The Verge Inside Sonos’ decision to sue Google — and how it won | Decoder (2022) Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:41Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. 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 CTO of Pandora, the VP of Product at Snap, the Chief Product Officer at Quibi, and he was on the board at Sonos during the 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. And you'll hear him say he thinks Sonos is fully out of that mess now and onto its next chapter with a huge product and platform launch called Sonos 27. I mean, come on, you all listen to the show. That is the most Decoder bait Decoder stuff imaginable.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  I've 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. And it's no surprise those fixes involve a lot of big changes to the company's structure, to its product lineup, and how Sonos fundamentally thinks about itself and what its product really 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 the 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,

• 3:05Speaker 02

  which means Google's Gemini assistant isn't currently available on Sonos devices. Oh, and of course, Tom and I talked about Weezy's smart home standards because I am a smart home nerd and I simply cannot help myself. But to his credit, Tom was willing to get into it and nerd out with me. And I think this conversation is pretty fun because of it. Okay, Sonos CEO, Tom Conrad, here we go. Tom Conrad, you're the CEO of Sonos. Welcome to Decoder.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's as they say, it's so great to be here.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  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. You and I have, I think the first time I met you was in the back of the car at CES when you were at Pandora.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Sounds right.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  100 years ago.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  100 years ago. We were children.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  We were little babies. We had, that car was driven by a human driver. That's how far, long ago it was.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  And then you took a turn through Quibi 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, 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?

• 4:16Speaker 03

  When I came in the door, one of my, my earliest observations was that the company sort of behaved like it was 100% hardware. But we're really 100% hardware and 100% software. And you know, you get either one of those even a little bit wrong and the impact is tremendous. Well, like, how does that show up like 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. And it all has to hang together in a cohesive and interesting and valuable way, or we're, we're just not doing the work.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  You know, 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, the highest level kind of mantra.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  When you say come into the company, do you mean as a board member or as the CEO?

• 5:19Speaker 03

  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, to take the job more permanently.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  The reason I ask that question is you obviously have two different views of the company and you're in different roles. But you know, we did have former CEO Patrick Spence on several times. And he said something very similar to me when he first took over. Sonos was kind of 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. He talked about that very openly with me. That led eventually to what I think is a moment of true crisis, right? The app launch, it was kind of a disaster. The system stopped working. That's when you came in to right the ship. Tell me about that gap, right? You came in and you said this company thinks it's a hardware company. That's kind of what your predecessor had been saying, but it, it went sideways in like big, meaningful ways.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Tell me about that moment and why you think it was the same conception even when you came in.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  As you describe, I got it. I've been involved with the company going back almost 20 years. We brought Pandora to Sonos in 2007, I think. So we got to get to know the company as a partner before I got to know it. As a board member, came onto the board in 2016, right as Patrick became CEO. From the vantage point of a board member, I got to participate in Patrick's chapter. And 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 emphasis on hardware products. We call it, you know, NPIs, new product introductions.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  In the chapter before him, it sometimes was years between new Sonos products. And he 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, the company has reliably shipped a couple of great products, hardware products, every year for close to a decade now. And sometimes when you energize an organization around an idea, there are unintended consequences. And I think one unintended consequence of that framing was the company got very focused on the individual products, one at a time. Even as a board member, like I received Rome as a portable speaker

• 7:46Speaker 03

  with a certain amount of battery life and waterproof and Bluetooth connectivity. I didn't really think about it as a member of the Sonos system. And even the software work that we did and, and every product that we make has a tremendous amount of software effort and innovation that goes into it. But even the software that we made was very focused on the individual NPIs. What can we do in software to differentiate move to from other speakers in that category? What was hard to do, was hard to prioritize in the company, was horizontal slices of software experiences that, that benefited all of the platform. And so in a way, I think some of the debt of that accumulated.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  And the company thought that the antidote was to recreate the app experience. As you know, we made a bunch of mistakes in, in, in that, 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 been candidly, I think, examined the original impetus in the first place. I was very like Sonos motivated. We'd like to put the app on a modern architecture to make us more nimble. In my chapter at Sonos, I'm, I'm really trying to bring it all back to, how can we focus on the customer first?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  I'm so inspired by talking to people on social and in my inbox and, and people in the industry like you about, about how do we show up and solve the real problems that are happening in real households? And, and I'm so excited about the things we're going to talk to you today because I think they're really an answer to many of those questions.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  I do, if you're a listener, you're not familiar with Tom. The man's on threads doing customer support every, every day. And I actually am like, I should not take advantage of this. I hold myself back from asking you for direct customer support all the time.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Anytime, anytime. The way you can, the way that you can tell it's actually me and not our Cracker Jack social team is that I often 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, and I do it when I can, but sometimes it perfectly.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  At least it's not AI avatar, Tom. That's, that's when we know it's, it's going to go sideways. 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, the feedback was immediately and intensely negative. Many, many things are 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, right? That Patrick has 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, what happened? What were the steps?

• 10:40Speaker 03

  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 that we needed on some of these dimensions, we had to make some changes in leadership and that included a CEO change. And it was a wild experience for me because I'll tell you, at no point in the last decade leading up to that day in January did I imagine that I might end up the CEO of Sonos.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  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 cliche, but like I'm a customer and like I love this product. And 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. And, you know, of course, as a board member, I felt some real culpability in it. Thrilled at the chance to come in and, you know, when you're an interim CEO, you're really, the assignment is to keep the wheels on. And the assignment at Sonos specifically was to right the ship.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And so during the period where 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. And 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 so excited about the things we're doing for our customers.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Very few people are going to get to interview to be the CEO of Sonos. Imagine at some point you went from being the interim CEO to wanting to be the permanent CEO. What was that process like? Did you write a memo? Was there a pitch deck? What were the steps?

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Yes, there are a couple of pitch moments, you know, that the board asked me completely reasonably to engage in the process of sort of applying for the job in the same way that all of the other talented candidates that they spoke to engaged. And so, you know, I took a personality test.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  What, you did? Like with the letters?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the letters thing, sure. They wanted to know what they were getting.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Do they know that that is basically just like astrology? Someone should tell them. All right.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  I presented more than once my vision for the company. 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. That was a, it was a period of intense, intense work for me and everybody around me at the company and, you know, 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 like, what kind of company are we going to build together in this next chapter?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  You know, when it was announced you became the permanent CEO, even when you were the interim CEO, my reaction was, oh, this makes sense. And maybe it was, to use like a football analogy, football teams hire defensive head coaches and offensive head coaches, right? And they come from that one side of the ball. And it was just obvious, oh, this company needs a software CEO. And Tom is a software guy. You're describing, obviously, it's both, right? You've got to ship hardware and software together. But I just, 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?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  My career started selling personal computers in 1986 or something at the original MicroCenter. If you've ever been to a MicroCenter, it's like one of the few remaining kind of big box retailers. So the original MicroCenter is in Columbus, Ohio. And at 16 years old, I walked into the CEO's office and said, I want to work here. And so for 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 life. So I became an engineer and a product designer out of a desire to help people, you know, learn to use these products. And that's really what's motivated me through my entire career.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  How do I help teams make great experiences? And so while it's true that I'm a, I'm a software person, 35 years in the business, my identity really is sort of 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.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  You appear to be through it now, right? 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, what, 18 months ago? You said you immediately shifted to strategic. 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?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I think by disposition, I'm a fairly right brained person. And I think that this intuitive feeling, you know, whatever creative, whatever the words are, not as quantitative. And, but my first job out of college was Apple, you know, and I think they, like from the, even as the early days when I was there, we talked about the sort of intersection of the arts and humanities and the sciences. And 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. And so the development of our strategy was very much like that.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  There, yes, there was a intuitive sense about what the right answer for Sonos was built up from my experience as a customer by observing our customers, talking to them through the years. And a piece of that is a perspective about where the puck is going. But, you know, 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. And 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.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  You've made some changes. It's time for the decoder question. You have restructured the company. There have been a few rounds of layoffs. How big is Sonos today?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  We're about 1,500 people.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And how is that structured?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  The company that I stepped into was divided into business units. So we had a team that was focused on home. We had a team that was focused on a professional opportunity, a team that was focused on home theater and so on. Well, something he said for that approach at a certain scale, my appraisal was we were subscale for the inefficiencies that creep in. We have the sort of almost guaranteed duplication of effort across the silos. And 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 sits far away from your

• 18:16Speaker 03

  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 sort of functional model. My leadership to team today, of course, we have a, you know, a finance organization, a legal organization, a sales organization, a marketing organization. But the product team now shows up as represented by hardware, software and global supply chain operations, to have leaders across each of those things. And what that allows us to do is to assemble cross-functional teams or matrix style to

• 19:01Speaker 03

  invest in the initiatives that are of the highest priority to our customers into the business in any given moment. And we can, we can flex that up and down, inside to side as our needs change. We might for an interim 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 sort of 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 state stage.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  You're describing the shift from a divisional structure to a vastly more functional structure.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  That's Apple, right?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Everyone, 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 is AI completely upended what you're doing?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  No, you know, we're as deep in this as anyone. And 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 a pretty deep embrace, if I'm honest. And some of that is on the backs of just how dramatically the tools have evolved over the course of the last 12 months. Certainly, you know, I think that almost everyone in the industry, you know, went home at the holidays at the tail end of 25, coming into 26 and came back just kind of gobsmacked by how much progress the Frontier Labs were making on agentic coding. And it's been a real accelerant for us.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  And as complex as this transition is, I'm, 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 in this moment.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Did you break up the sort of classic PM designer engineer triad or is that still the core building block?

• 21:05Speaker 03

  We still have all three, but you know, it blurs as particularly as the designers and the product managers, you know, can be prototypers at a really high level with incredible efficiency. It's exciting to see how quickly they can communicate their ideas now and a medium that just didn't exist at all for them a year ago.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  That brings me to the other decoder question. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?

• 21:27Speaker 03

  I don't think you bring just one framework to every decision. And so we talked about, for example, product decisions. As an idea moves through its lifecycle from it's like days, it's like an early little sapling that you have to like kind of care and tend to through final mass production for a hardware object and out into the channels, I think how you think about decisions are different. So in the, in the earliest of days, I really tried to protect the creativity of the company and to not let the antibodies of doubt and critique sort of erode an idea before it's had a chance to express itself in a way that anybody could get excited about, which means...

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Creating room for risk-taking and creativity and qualitative assessment and prototyping before you get to the details of the business case and the hard trade-offs that you make when 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, it's more and more people aggregate into the product. You become, I think, just naturally much more sort of quantitative in your analysis of the decisions and you ask the teams to bring a really thoughtful, detailed sort of description of the puts and takes and the risks associated with it and use that

• 22:56Speaker 03

  to help you make your decisions. But maybe over top of that, you just have to hire great people. I mean, you just do. And you have to put them on teams that are appropriate size for the task at hand. And I think it's going to be very, very difficult for any CEO or any leadership team to make great decisions that people who aren't bringing the ideas themselves aren't great. And so I suppose it starts with the right people in the seats.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  The reason I ask that question in that way is I think maybe the decision you made that is most emblematic to me of we're going from a divisional structure with individual P and 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 Pine Wood, which was a set-top box that was going to integrate all the streaming services. This is 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 that division could go was to go 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 like 100%.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Everyone knows the speakers in their TVs are bad.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  It's a great business and we're for sure the best product in the category.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  And so if you want to grow, the big thing, you're going to be like, how do we grow? And you're like, well, I gotta, I gotta beat Roku. And then now you're just like off doing that. And you came in and you just ended that. And I thought, oh, this is, this is not just a decision to end a product line. This is 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, is that how you saw it?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  It's like so many things, like these decisions do have, you know, more than one, you know, 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 like allows us to be most differentiated in the competitive set and that that's the incredible system-ness of the product and the, and the audio experience that we can deliver and, you know, attending to what at the time was a very long list of things that our customers were sort of explicitly asking us for.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  If, you know, if we were actually putatively, if we were working on a set-top box in that moment. Another thing that I might have wondered about is, was, is our desire to make this particular product, does it come from our customer or does it come from some sort of internally sourced sense of like business opportunity? 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 always to start from a place of like, what do we really see in the market from customers?

• 26:00Speaker 03

  And I'm not sure that they were saying, we want a high-end streaming box that is sort of somehow the love child of an Apple TV and a Roku.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Although that love child, I would be very worried about that love child. Like, why does this, why does this product have like 200 gigs of storage for no identifiable reason, but also show me ads at all times? We'll set that aside. 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?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  As we've been saying, I think that there's the quant and there's the qual. The quant is green across the board. You know, 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, 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, you know, an individual customer on some dimension. Maybe this, this game is like never over.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  You're just always trying to polish off the remaining rough edges of everything that you do. And so, you know, 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. Yes, I think in every, in every measurable way, it's behind us, but it's a never forget kind of chapter for the company.

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• 29:40Speaker 02

  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, if you, and I know you know me, I'm like ready to go on all these names and all these ideas. In there somewhere is MCP support. There's a big idea about assistance that I want to talk about. You're cashing some chips, right? You're saying, okay, we're, here's a big new idea. Trust us, we're going to get it right this time. You're ready for it.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel very ready. You know, 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, about their capabilities, but how we're going to share them with the world and where we're going to sort of enter a period of co-creation with our customers. We recently have done that with some of the app enhancements that we've been rolling out. We've rolled out through 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 kind of chapter of engagement with the community that I think we really lacked for a while. So yeah, I feel very ready. Should we talk about it?

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's get into it. Sonos 27, Sonos Fabric, what are these things? Explain, explain to people what's going on here.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  100% hardware, 100% software. For 20 years, we've given all of our hardware objects names, Rome, Arc, Beam, Ace, Era, but we've never named the software platform, the thing that takes these collection of products and creates a consistent whole. And so in some ways, the big news that we're sharing right now is that the software platform has a name called Sonos 27. It has a bunch of promises that it makes to customers and it's, and it's nuts and bolts. It's an ecosystem platform that allows a huge heterogeneous world of services to come together in your home.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  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 a 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 like 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, you know, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 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 we're pointing

• 32:20Speaker 03

  a vector into the future of more to come. And then 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 capability that we're calling custom agents, just like multi-tenancy inside of the platform to allow modern voice assistants to live side by side and interact with one another on the platform. Through 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.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  The Beam Ultra is the new soundbar, and I think it's 7.1.2. This is very nerdy, but it, to me, it represents, oh, Atmos is like totally mainstream now at this price point.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  That might be an entirely different home theater podcast.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  And maybe my- I can't wait for you to hear it, honestly. I mean, it really, I mean, obviously, I'm biased, I consider this first, but it sounds amazing. People who have heard it just can't stop talking about that, how great this little soundbar sounds.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Honestly, I should quit doing this and just do a home theater podcast. Like, where does my heart truly lie? It's that, it's just doing that.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  I'm down, I'm down, anytime. You need a, you need a co-host, we should do it.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Look, I just judged the TV shootout and Sony lost. It's like a big deal. It's, 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 will be a Sonos 28 one year from now in August 27.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  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, that Sonos does evolve over time. And for many, many years, that evolution was to the great benefit of our customers. We had lossless audio for, for Apple. We had, you know, high fidelity audio for Spotify. We had AirPlay, we had Alexa. We, 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. 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 and improve through time. And, and so as we started thinking about like, well, how do you really do that?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  The first thing they came to is like, gosh, we already have OS, like right in the name of the company. And so, and so to, to, to try to brand some entirely new thing felt like, kind of like a self-own. And so we pretty quickly sort of reverted to this idea that like, the product is 100% hardware and 100% software. The product is Sonos, not Arc. Like, maybe the OS 2 is called Sonos. And then it's like, well, what companion moniker can we give it to drive that idea home? And obviously, we talked about version numbers and any number of other things. But we did decide that we'd like to take advantage of this.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Like, 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, as a descriptor for that was, was a better mechanism than almost anything else we thought that was available to us.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Those software cycles, you know, yearly big releases. Apple is basically the only company that sticks to it. And even they don't do it, they announce all the features and then they slowly dribble them out over the course of a year is, is they come into focus. You're, again, this is, I have a lot of questions of 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?

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Fortunately, the industry has gotten away from, away from that. And, and our intention is to have a moment where we can tell the story of the operating system roadmap for the next, you know, six or 10 months. And, and as you'll see, even in this moment, that the things that we're announcing, many of them will be available in, in what we're calling early access, which is the chance for us to put them out into the product. I sort of opt-ins for our customers, do that sort of perspective collecting, real world data collecting sort of work. And, and, and, you know, all of these products will continue to evolve through the year. I know that I'm going to get questions from customers and observers about, but what about this feature? And I think really the answer is just going to be like, we know the stuff.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Like, there's very, there's very little that you can, you know, say, hey, someone should do this. That's probably not on our list. And so to be able to say, look, part of the, part of what we're communicating with the 27 of it all is that this stuff will come in 27, and if it doesn't, it'll come 28 or beyond.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  One of the big ideas here is obviously 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, there's just an ambient assistant in your house that is addressing the fabric through MCP? Is it, you'll interoperate with other speakers that might be in the house? What does the biggest vision of this look like?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways you'll have to stay tuned to, to, to see where we take this. But, but I do think, I, I'll start with this. I think that every home deserves this infrastructure. Like, I think sound is, it's an incredible sort of mood stabilizer, if you like. I mean, take, 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, is something that everybody should enjoy. And so part of the big picture is we want to spread this far and wide and, and make it accessible to everyone. And, and you know, it's sort of a running joke about the first generation of assistants, they've ended up sort of being for timers.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  I think you really do, when you're building out this next generation of voice-centric experiences, like you do really have to look at like, not what can the technology do, but what does the customer want? And, you know, one of the new capabilities in Sonos 27 is our new voice assistant. And our voice assistant, yes, is built on modern generative technology. But it's really inspired by what people tell us that they like to see in the home. And I'll tell you, the, the killer app of the assistant is they just want to be able to talk to it like a normal person. Well, stop. Like, like, the first generation of assistants, you just had to guess what to say every time.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  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 like as the theme song for that show. It was on Fox, it was called The Curmudgeonly Doctor House. And just have the thing, it's teardrop by massive attack.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  I know, they took it off the streaming. It's a real, it's a real, it's sad.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  It is, it is. So that's kind of job one, if you like. And the first generation assistants didn't do it at all. Sonos Voice in the new OS is exceptional at this. That's the kind of meet the customer where they are. What else did they say? Well, they say a little bit about like 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. And then they do say, my wife and I are constantly like settling little bets in the kitchen. What was this thing called? Who is that actor? They do want comprehensive world knowledge, wanting to get an answer to the kid's homework assignment or whatever. These agents do need to be able to hand off to comprehensive frontier models to, to get perspectives on, on the world.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  And in some instances, those perspectives are, are, allow them to, to use the, the frontier model to manipulate the audio environment, to play some music that people are talking about on TikTok. Pick some stuff that sounds like the shoegaze music that I liked when I was in college. Like, we can leverage the power of a frontier model to, you know, understand what's being talked about on TikTok to sort that against my musical preferences and, and deliver it. And then, you know, I guess while we're, while we're numerating what I think a, a modern voice assistant has to do, it has to be fast, it has to be reliable, and it has to be kind of responsible and affordable to run. I mean, I think, I do think that, that customers want this as a fundamental capability of, of a product like Sonos.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  And we built an architecture that allows us to deliver it to every one of our customers and to hold out.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  There's a lot of big decoder, big verge ideas in all of there, all the way down to where does the compute live? Right? Like, where, 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, it's a Lutron partnership you have now. 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. And I think our reporting from the wonderful Gen 2s, our smart home reporter, has suggested you don't think it's ready. This is a lot of stacked problems. All, and like, and I'm just going to read your press release to you. It says, Sonos 27 MCP allows you to connect any outside AI system or agent to your system, including ChatGPT.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  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, is Google in your list? Because it's, there's a lot of competitive dimension here.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  You know, in many ways, we have a- Strong relationship with Google for the state despite the lawsuit. We do music and it's one of the most listened to music services on the platform. We do have a long history of first generation Google Assistant, you know, on many of our products. We'd love to continue to work with them on all of these things and those conversations continue.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  I guess I'm just going to push on this. Connect any AI assistant or agent, there's two big ones, right? There's Alexa and there's Google. You might be in third place, Siri exists. Those are the, those are the ones, right? Maybe there's going to be this chat GPT product in the future.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  I want to tease apart two different things. There's, um, let's talk about, uh, command and control of Sonos system through external agentic interfaces to just use every buzzword. What I really mean is 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. So, and by connecting that tool into your experience, however you access it, you'll be able to summon Sonos.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Maybe you're working along on something and you want some music to play. You 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. You know, as we see these, these kind of, you know, open claw style agentic proactive asynchronous kind of agents evolve, now they have access to Sonos in a, in a supported, supportable way. It's been a bunch of sort of hack MCPs and CLI's for Sonos around that in many, you know, a lot of reporting about how they're among the most utilized sort of examples for these things or excited to, to officially support such a thing. As much as fun as it is to see the mainstream use cases, I'm very excited to see what hobbyists are going to do with Sonos MCP.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  So let's not talk about like on device though, on our devices. So we've, we've been working closely with, uh, Amazon for some time, um, to bring Alexa Plus to, um, our platform. That work continues. I'm excited about it. Don't have anything to announce today, but, um, uh, we've had a long and real successful relationship with, with Amazon through the years. Panos was on the board with me for many of, uh, our years at Sonos.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  By the way, that's just so people know, that's Panos Panay who now runs hardware and Alexa at Amazon.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. Friend of the show.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, Panos and I are buds too. Yep.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  We're going to demonstrate something we call Sonos custom agents, which lets you take, um, any of these, uh, inference engines, they said the anthropic engine, the, the OpenAI engine, Gemini engine, the Grok engine and, um, uh, invoke it from Sonos.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  And, uh, you'll be able to give it a, a unique voice, you'll be able to give it a name and you'll be able to give it a, a context that has it show up in a particular way. Imagine that you'd like to have a personality that lives inside of Sonos. That's the John Cusack character, um, from High Fidelity. Kind of opinionated record store geek who like, is like, is interested in like, like, uh, kind of subtly shading your perspectives in music and, and, but also making recommendations. You can, uh, you'll be able to go in, uh, uh, set up a custom agent in Sonos that says, you know, uh, let's use, uh, OpenAI inference. Let's use this voice I pick.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  And let's give it this personality and let's have it live alongside an agent that's powered by anthropic inference. That's gonna, that is going to be, give me advice on cooking. And, uh, let's do another one that, um, is only interested in, uh, connecting me with , uh, opportunities to see live music. And all of these tools will be able to show up in the, inside of Sonos. Invoked by the name you give it, Tay Sonos, connect me to the curator and, uh, talk to you only about that topic, um, have a point of view, uh, and be able to access the Sonos

• 46:14Speaker 03

  context, um, uh, so that, uh, uh, they can sort of hand off from one to the other.

• 46:29Speaker 04

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• 48:05Speaker 02

  Let me bring some of these together. There's the idea that there's external command and control, right? I have a, 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 Plus being there. And then we're going to make new custom ones out of building blocks that are evolved in lots of different ways. When I said, when I asked, where is the computer? This is like, to me, like the big question in 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?

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Somewhere in your home, if you're going to control lights and music and everything else, there needs to be some logic happening in your home. There's 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. There's like 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, a new HomePod with an AI enabled Siri? And they already have a home kit, 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 a home and you need to stave that off and make sure people are talking directly

• 49:31Speaker 02

  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, they're messy, right? They're political in like very specific ways. So how do you see the competition and victory there and success there? And then how do you solve just like the capability gap that every other company has run into?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  I think that we, as an industry, we, there are these kind of platform shifts that unlock opportunity for companies who get lucky on timing. You know, so for example, the original dot com era was like really powered by Oracle and Sun Solaris boxes and, you know, data centers that you owned and operated yourself. And then we, we went through a chapter where the infrastructure became, you know, Linux and open source for your data tier. And then of course we've had this huge, long run of, of cloud infrastructure. And I think, you know, if you're a company that builds your stack on Solaris and Oracle,

• 50:39Speaker 03

  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. You know, when I hear you on the show, talk about your experience with, um, voice assistants that are going through the transition of first generation to second generation. It feels to me like so much of the challenge there is about how do we drag along all of the committed relationships that we have for the internet connected toaster and back massager and all of the things that are, you know, connected into those existing historical ecosystems. And honestly, even in the world of, of AI, just how, how much has changed in the last

• 51:24Speaker 03

  couple of years underneath the companies as they're, um, building out their, their answers here. It really feels to me like we are stepping into a moment where agentic tool use powered by protocols like MCP are going to, going to, uh, disintermediate a lot of that stuff that you're sort of talking about. 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, and, uh, 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

• 52:08Speaker 03

  protocols with 17 different, you know, uh, hubs in the closet.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, well, part of the opportunity there is you don't have the big voice system. I don't think the current Sonos voice assistant is not at the scale of Alexa or Google or assistant, right? I'm, I'm just guessing. They do have that problem, like the light switches in my house are, they're in the walls. They're gonna, they're gonna be there. That Lutron hub is there. It, it's not great, although Lutron is the best one, but it's still, there's a box in my house. And there's a lot of those little weird little boxes like in my house because I have a, a smart home. All of those dependencies exist for those platforms for reasons. And if you show up, uh, and so use my voice assistant instead, and it can't operate all of the lights. Well, I'm just gonna fall back to Amazon or I'm gonna fall back to Google and they know it and they know they can't break those things.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Panos and I've 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. Right? There's a network in my house. There's 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 gonna replace every job in America should be able to traverse my network. And turn on the lights like without any help. Like that's what it should do. And some of the very first, like big vibe coding shockwaves.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Were like AI researchers, like bleeding edge AI researchers being like, I figured out how to control my shades. They walked through my network and the shades can go up and down now, right? We're not there at the consumer level, like the, the promise is not there. We're still, I'm still here talking to you about Matter and Thread and 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 don't submit on threads. Like, that's the promise, but I, the gap to that seems really, really huge. Are, are you able to close that? Is that the opportunity?

• 54:13Speaker 03

  I think we're just still like in the Apple two days of, of the home automation space. And so while there is, as you point out, this like incredible wild, you know, heterogeneous world of different light switch controllers. I think when you talk to kind of, you know, mainstream consumers about their homes, they're not there yet. Um, and so I, I do think that because of the sort of profound technological sort of step function of agenda control of these kinds of services and things like tool use that, that as the consumer catches up with the, the, uh, the industry's ambition to solve these problems, that new technological solutions will, uh, emerge. And I, I'm really excited about how I think how we're positioned to, to ride that

• 54:57Speaker 03

  transition and not be encumbered by the, the decade of early adopter, you know, uh, internet connected light switches.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  What are you gonna do about the light switches that are already in the walls?

• 55:08Speaker 03

  I just don't think that there's enough of them to matter in the final answer. And of course, and of course, Lutron is a great partner and they do a great job with this.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  They do. I mean, we, we have them. We got all kinds of light switches. We mostly have Lutron ones. But I, that's kind of my question is 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.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Is it though, or, or is it more like the difference between the people that were adopting, you know, uh, Creative Labs MV3 players before the iPod came along? Was the iPod really for those people or was it for people that, that, that had that problem? But were nowhere near the people that then early adopters or, you know, to the iPhone, 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? And I, I think we're making.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  Is that, is that the idea here? iPhone for smart home control or iPhone for audio in the home?

• 56:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  The turn there that I think is really interesting is who are you gonna talk to? Where is the computer? What is the computer? And you're kind of describing, if you want music, you're gonna talk to Sonos. But you also have a general purpose assistant like Claude or ChatGPT and they can talk to Sonos too. And it's unclear to me, and maybe one of the most fascinating questions in this moment in tech of where the interface goes. Are we all gonna have one chatbot that does everything? And all the demand is aggregated there and I don't know, OpenAI becomes more powerful than ever.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Or are we gonna have lots and lots of assistants that we address in lots and lots of different ways? And it seems like your bet is Sonos will have a personality in your home, maybe multiple personalities in your home. And you, and customers will address that. And all the other stuff will go somewhere else.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  For 20 years, we've found a lot of success, uh, around the idea of embracing sort of every dimension of the problem. You know, uh, yes, there's an app, but you're welcome to engage with us through AirPlay or Spotify Connect. Yes, we have a voice assistant, but it lives side by side with, with Alexa. Yes, we have proprietary mesh, but it integrates with Bluetooth and even line in. And, uh, uh, I think our bet is that we're gonna, you know, we're about a size and scale that, that allows us to both be nimble and react to these changes, but also have enough horsepower to sort of keep up technologically with, with, with the best in the category you're doing. So, you know, I think some of this just plays out on the field.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  And just one last idea, since you said it a couple of times, this question about like, where does the compute live? I think one incredibly powerful opportunity for Sonos is that we do place compute in millions and millions of homes. People 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, um, in a way that looks like just one surface area to the customer. And I, I think that the answer to your question about does this live in the cloud? Does this live in the home? Does it live in a box? I think the answer is yes. And, and I think we're pretty uniquely situated to, to take advantage of an architecture where it's not

• 58:13Speaker 03

  cloud only, it's not home only, but it's a sort of integrated system that combines all of that together. And at the end of the day, that is what Sonos 27 is.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Just to make that really reductive. Where, when I say where is the computer in, in the home context? What I mean is maybe in the nineties, 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. And none of that really ever came to pass, right? 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.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  In the smart home, you know, I've got a bunch of, I don't know, automations in my house. When the garage door opens, the lights turn on and other stuff happens at night. You know, the doors all lock if they're not locked. That logic has to live somewhere. And I, you know, my perspective on it is it should live in my house. Like if the internet goes down, the lights should still turn on.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  This is not anything to you like big AI integrations or, uh, you know, the, the new MCP way to address the Sonos system. Right? Those are big ideas. And I'm just like insistently dragging you back down into the dirt of like, if the internet goes out, are the lights still gonna turn on?

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't wanna, yeah, you don't wanna be the partner that put in the internet connected light switches that don't work when the internet is down.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  But it's not just the internet connected light switches. It's the logic of making it all work together.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, there. For 40 years now, we've been talking about technology for the home.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  And, you know, starting with the personal computer, which is supposed to be some, the center of that, the technological household, but we didn't really get that. We got laptops that people, you know, you mostly use at work and use a bit at the home. And then, and then we got mobile. Mobile is supposed to be the thing that you engage with when you leave your house.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  On your way to work. And of course, it, the, the fundamental, the 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 like, nobody loves it. Nobody, no, no spouses ever said, I wish my husband was on his phone more. I wish my kid used their iPad more. And so we're, we're looking for ways to get beyond that. And to your point, the other compute that's in the home, like I said, uh, that's a box is largely just sort of a web browser to a bunch of services that lives in the cloud. I think it's pretty interesting actually that in, you know, 17 million homes,

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Sonos is like an actual, uh, mesh of compute in your house with a real horsepower, real memory, real CPU, real capability, real operating system, just waiting to, um, to be the, uh, the container for some of the kinds of things you're talking about. So super interesting. We'll figure it out over time.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  I feel like you're, you're this close to being like, and then the Teslas will be a data center. Like there's something there that is like maybe the, the line. I actually wanted to, to push on that a little bit. The initial Sonos innovation 100 years ago, right? When a company started was, oh, we can build a mesh network, right? We can do wireless audio at scale. We can synchronize the latency of all the speakers. It sounds like the same music playing at the same time. This was a lot of big engineering back in the day. And now you're saying, okay.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Still, I mean, candidly, still with a lot of, a lot of what our, our, our, our, our software team does day in and day out is, is extend and, and, and maintain that, that infrastructure.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  There's features you're announcing here is, is part of fabric that I, I think are interesting. Right? If you have surrounds, you can just place them and they'll figure out that there's 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?

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  I, I think any thoughtful, uh, product leader is going to tell you the focus is an important part of success. And, and we are, I, I do feel like that, that, uh, so much interesting work for us to do and around creating an audio system that sets the mood for your home that, that I don't want us to take our, our eye off of that opportunity. And we are doing some really exciting things in Sonos Fabric and, and Sonos 27 that we should talk about. They get to, to some of the work that you're describing. Um, but certainly in the moments where you allow yourself to think about what's the company in five years? What's the company in 10 years? You can't, you can't help it, but, um, interrogate what the opportunity is for, uh, you know, a, a mesh,

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  a fabric of, of compute that, that lives in the home.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  I want to end by talking about headphones really quickly. We just had the CEO of Bose on. She and I are pretty searching conversation about what happens to the headphone market in the time of AI wearables. And, you know, my, my fear, my anxiety about audio always is 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.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Um, and that's just the way it goes. Uh, and it has always been what the, 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 in, with Siri. When Google and Samsung ship very similar products, there's undoubtedly going to be a flood of, of AI hardware startups that want to put something in your ears or anybody 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, do you think there's going to be a range of voice assistants on headphones? Or do you think the, what you would call the first party vendors are going to just grab more and more of that share?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Before we jump to the hypotheticals about where headphones are going to tell you, can I tell you a little bit about the new headphones?

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  All right. You know, one of the things that you get from entering a new market is the opportunity to build something, put it on customers' homes and learn a lot about what matters and what doesn't matter. Um, so we launched Sonos Ace two years ago. Um, I think measured against any of the other premium over ear noise cancelling headphones in the market, they're a great product. They've got great reviews. Um, they got great noise cancelling, they're super comfortable, they look great. Really proud of the product. 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.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  It was, I, I think it was the most visible expression of the, of the missed opportunity of that moment to, for the company to like, just always remember that the products that we make are part of the Sonos system, not individual offerings. And so we ended up with a great pair of headphones. But honestly, and then you would use them all the time, there are lots of great headphones. When we set out to take all of the lessons that we learned from Ace, um, to design Ace Ultra, at the very top of that list is like, 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. Um, and the, the, the model through which you invoke, uh, uh, your headphones has to be completely seamless

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  and delightful. And so we built an entirely new hardware platform for Ace Ultra called Headphone Engine 2. Um, 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 headphone, which doesn't have the, the horsepower to, to run the full stack, kill battery life, et cetera. And so 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 in your headphones and the music will, um, jump from the speaker into your headphone. No Bluetooth, no phone.

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  You're going 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, um, location sensing stuff that we've developed. Super magical. It's the one job that we had, um, and didn't deliver on with Ace. Really excited to get it out into the market. Analogous to that, on the, uh, on the home theater side is, as you mentioned, we're making all of our portable speakers, Sonos Play, Sonos Move, capable of being rear channels, um, for home theater. And that, that sounds really easy. It's like, and maybe people will be like, why wasn't that always possible? Um, but, uh, to your point about the deep technology of it,

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  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. And 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 now a real time reconfiguration of that networking stack. And you have to know when to do it. So we're using accelerometers in the product to actually know that you've picked it up and set it down in a new location. And we're using Sonos Positioning System, which uses ultrasonic signaling to broadcast the room. Hey, is there a soundbar here?

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Ultrasonic comes back saying, I'm here. They negotiate position, um, left, right distance so that they can optimize, um, the, the, the surround sound experience. You pick it up again, you take it back to the kitchen and it's a regular speaker again. Um, all happens magically, no use of the app. It's, it's pretty cool.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Answer my question on headphones, though. This is my big worry, right? 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 and then, and you can just say, show me what I'm looking at and a picture will be taken automatically and, uh, something will happen.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  We'll, we'll all get over the privacy implication of that. But like, that's a collapse of the headphone market.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Maybe headphones come in all kinds of form factors today over your in ear, cuffs, um, wireless, wired. It's a market where people choose different form factors for different chat tasks. You know, we're really focused on this, you know, personal in the home listening. What do you do when the baby's asleep? Um, what do you do, um, when you want to, you know, move the party from the, from the kitchen to the, the den while you relax for the evening? And 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, uh, adventurous, wackadoodle consumer electronics that are connected to this new emerging AI universe. Um, uh, most of them will be a swing and a miss.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  Of course, we've already seen some of those. Um, it's just a little hard to speculate about, I think, about which of these things, if any, is going to have its kind of iPod moment or its iPhone moment or whatever. What do you think is going to happen?

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  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. Right? The, the sort of like high end wired headphones for phones, anyway, have mostly gone away. And you have a bunch of sort of medium Bluetooth competitors. But that, but the phone makers have largely taken that with first party products. And then you have your products at the high end competing with really high end noise cancelling products from Bose and Sony and whoever. And that is like the airplane set. And the lack of the open interconnect has really killed sort of 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.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  And it's integrate AI, right? In like very specific ways directly into their operating system. We'll see how that plays out, right? There's also a thing that's different this time is there's a vastly more energized European regulatory environment. Who knows how this will play like?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  I can't tell you, but like 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.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  The only counter that I, that I might offer is that, you know, it's a lot of talk about the walled garden of the, the Bluetooth advantages that the platform companies have. But I would say even, even without the European regulators, it's sort of notable that something like the Meta Glasses can have a, a reasonable, I think commercially viable set of experiences that are principally powered by compute that lives on your phone, um, and, and still deliver conversational AI that, you know, is, is mediated by a Bluetooth connection, admittedly behind some of the obstacles that you're describing. But those obstacles aren't so profound that, that, that clever companies aren't figuring out how to work within those constraints.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  No, I'm very curious to see how that plays out. I, it, it doesn't seem like it's in focus. Again, uh, probably because like you say, none of the products are in focus. Like no one knows what a hit product here looks like. So you, you might as well let a thousand flowers bloom and then radically construct the market. Like, that, that, that seems like what everyone is doing, but I'm, something there is, is going to be a, a, a turn that happens here. 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.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Super fun.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Tell us what's next for Sonos. When does all this stuff ship?

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  I think by the time this airs, we'll have announced all of this. The world, we're having a big event in New York to share Sonos O27 and Sonos Voice 27 and the Ace Ultra and Beam Ultra. 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.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  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, will be able to observe the twang that comes back from their home and make sure that we're delivering exactly the experience that we want. We're excited about the sort of moment of co-creation that's around the corner for us. And and then, 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 a Sonos 28 and 29 and 30 and beyond.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  That's great. All right. I got to ask you at the end. I have ceiling speakers in my kitchen that are connected to a Sonos amp. There's a Google Home Hub right there and it 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.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  All right. I don't know the answer, but I'd love to figure it out. I'd love to figure it out for you. I know, I know, I know the right folks to call, so let's get you connected.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're gonna have a Decoder Roundtable.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, if your, if your, if your, 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.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Usually I end by inviting people back, but I'm saying we gotta fix it.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  And then we're going to talk about what it took to fix it. That's the plan.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Tom, this is great. Thank you so much, man.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Super fun. Thank you.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Tom for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. And we have a TikTok and an Instagram, same handle at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. Show's producers are Greg Ott, Kay Cox, and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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