How Sonos rebooted itself

Introduction to the Show

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1:56Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay 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. As you'll hear him say, he thinks Sonos is fully out of that mess now,

2:29and on to 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. 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 involved 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

3:03call 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, which means Google's Gemini assistant isn't currently available on Sonos devices. Oh, and of course, Tom and I talked about Weedzie'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.

Taking Over as CEO

3:37Okay. Sonos CEO, Tom Conrad. Here we go. 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. You and I have, I think the first time I met you was in the back of a car at CES when you were at Pandora. Sounds right. A hundred years ago. A hundred years ago. We were children. We were little babies. That car was driven by a human driver. That's how far along ago it was.

4:08That's right. 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, in 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 sort of

4:39behaved like it was 100% hardware, but were 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

5:10and valuable way, or we're just not doing the work. 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 highest level kind of mantra. When you say come into the company, do you mean as a board member or as the CEO? 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.

5:45The reason I asked that question is, you obviously had two different views of the company 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

6:20and you said this company thinks it's a hardware company. That's kind of what your predecessor had been saying, but it went sideways in, like, big, meaningful ways. Tell me about that moment and why you think it was the same conception even when you came in. As you describe, I got it. I've been involved in 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

6:51vantage 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 an emphasis on hardware products. We call them, you know, NPIs, new product introductions. In the chapter before him, it sometimes was years between new Sonos products. And he said, look, we're going to make

7:26a 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. 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

8:00speaker 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 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 benefited all of the platform. And so in a

8:38way, I think some of the debt of that accumulated. And the company thought that the antidote was to recreate the app experience. As you know, we made a bunch of mistakes in 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

9:13original impetus in the first place. That 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 really trying to bring it all back to how can we focus on the customer first? I'm so inspired by talking to people on social and in my inbox and people in the industry like you about how do we show up and solve the real problems that are happening in real households. 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. I do. If you're a listener, you're not familiar with Tom, the man's on threads doing customer

9:47support 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. Anytime, anytime. 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 I do it when I can, but sometimes they're perfectly. At least it's not AI avatar Tom. That's when we know it's

10:19going 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 gets to go and we need a new CEO. You're going to be the interim CEO. Tell us about that process. Very, very few

10:50people will ever be in that kind of process or get insight into that process. What happened? What were the steps? 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

11:20some 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. 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 I'm a customer and I love this product. There was a Sonos move in the

11:52room 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 really, the assignment is to keep the wheels on.

12:20And the assignment at Sonos specifically was to right the ship. 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. Very few people are going to get to interview to be the CEO of Sonos. Imagine at some point you went

12:54from being the interim CEO to wanting to be the permanent CEO. What was that process like? Did you write a memo? Was there a, was there a pitch deck? What were the steps? Yeah, there were a couple of, of, of pitch moments, you know, that the, the board asked me completely reasonably to engage in the process of, uh, sort of applying for the job in the same way that all of the other talented candidates that they spoke to engaged. And so, um, you know, I took a personality test. I, uh, well, you did like with the letters, like one of the letters things, sure. They wanted to know what they were getting.

13:29Do they know that that is basically just, just like astrology? Like someone should tell them. All right. I presented more than once my vision for the company. I had the incredible advantage of, 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, to get to this next chapter. That was a, it was a period of, of, um, 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

14:02and 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? You know, when, when it was announced that you become the

Software and Hardware Strategy

14:15permanent 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, higher 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, I, 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

14:48initially? My career started selling personal computers in 1986 or something at the original micro center. If you ever been to a micro center, it's like one of the few remaining kind of big box retailers for, so the original micro centers 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,

15:25you know, 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? And so while it's true that I'm a, I'm a software person, 35 years in the business, I'm, 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. You appear to be through it now, right? There's a big stack of announcements here,

15:57including 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? I think by disposition, I'm a fairly right-brained person. And I think that, uh, uh, this is intuitive feeling, you know, whatever creative, whatever the

16:29words are, not, not as quantitative. And, um, but my first job out of college was, was Apple, you know, and I think they like, from the, even as the early days when I was there, you 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 there. Yes. There was a intuitive sense about what the right

17:03answer for Sonos was built up from my experience as a customer by observing our customer, 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. Um, and lots of people around me in the organization who can bring that quantitative framing. And, and, uh, I think one advantage I had over other CEO candidates was that I could bring some of that horsepower to bear on the

17:35story that I shared with the board about my, my, my vision for the future of the company.

Restructuring the Company

17:39You've made some changes. It's time for the decoder question. You have restructured the company. There have been a few rounds of layoffs. Uh, how big is Sonos today? We're about 1500 people. And how is that structured? The company that I, uh, stepped into, um, was divided into business units. Um, so we had, uh, uh, uh, a team that was focused on home. We had a team that was focused on a professional opportunity, a team that was focused on, um, home theater, uh, and so on. Well, something he said for that approach at a certain scale, my appraisal was we were subscale for the, um,

18:15the inefficiencies that creep in. We have the sort of almost guaranteed duplication of effort across the, 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 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 reorganize the company into a sort of functional, um, model. My leadership to team

18:47team today, um, of course we have a, you know, a finance organization, a legal organization, um, uh, uh, sales organization, a marketing organization, but the product team now shows up, um, as represented by hardware, software, and global supply chain operations. Um, so leaders across each of those things. Um, and what that allows us to do is to assemble, um, cross-functional teams or matrix style, um, to invest in the initiatives that are of the highest priority to our customers

19:19into the business in any given moment. And we can, we can, we can flex that up and down, uh, and side to side as, as, as, uh, uh, our needs change. We might, for an intro, be very focused on, um, this part of the portfolio over here. And then we might be able to move to, um, focusing on a different corner of the portfolio. No one has to get a new boss, uh, and people can sort of fluidly move from, from these things and, uh, get new opportunities to learn. It just strikes me as a much more appropriate organization structure for our current state stage.

19:49You're describing the shift from a divisional structure to a vastly more functional structure. Yes. That that's Apple, right? Yeah. Everyone, 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 has AI completely upended what you're doing? No, I, I, you know, uh, we're as deep in this as anyone. And, um, what's been really fun for me

20:23over the course of the last year is to watch the software engineering team go from thoughtful, uh, skepticism to, to 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, uh, you know, 12 months. Certainly, you know, the, I think almost everyone in the industry, you know, went home at the holidays at the tail end of, of 25, uh, coming into 26 and came back just kind of gobsmacked by how much progress the, um, uh, uh, frontier labs were making on agentic coding. And, and it's been a

20:58real accelerant for us. 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, gets built. And it's fun to, to get to be a part of that this moment. Did you break up the sort of classic PM designer engineer triad, or is that still the core building block? We still have all three, but you know, it, it, it blurs as the, particularly as the designers and the product managers, you know, can be prototypers at a, at a really high level with

21:29incredible efficiency. It's, it's, it's exciting to see how quickly they can communicate their ideas now and, and a medium that just didn't exist at all for them a year ago. That brings me to the other decoder question. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? I don't think you bring just one framework to every decision. And, and so we've talked about, for example, um, product decisions as an idea moves through its life cycle 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

22:05you 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, um, which means creating room for risk-taking and creativity and qualitative assessment and prototyping before you get to the, the details of the business case and the,

22:40the hard trade-offs that you make when on a journey from an idea to something you can actually ship. But of course, as the, as the programs roll along and they, they take on more and more financial investment and, and, um, organizational risk, it's more and more people, uh, aggregate into the, the, 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 to help

23:11you make your decisions. But maybe, maybe over top 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 appropriate size, um, for the task at hand. And I think it's gonna 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. Um, and so I suppose it starts with, with the right people in the seats. The reason I asked that question in that way is I think maybe the, the decision you made that is most emblematic to me of we're going from a divisional structure with individual PNLs to a more

23:46functional structure and thinking about the platform as a whole was the decision to kill a product that I believe was called Pinewood, which was a set top box. It was going to integrate all the streaming services as well reported, uh, by former Verge reporter, Chris Welch, who's now 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 I, 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 a hundred percent. Everyone knows the speakers and their

24:21TVs are bad. It's a great business. And we're for sure the best product in the category. 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. Does that, is that how you saw it? It's like so many things like these decisions do have, you know, uh, more than one,

24:54you 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 systemness of the product and, uh, and the, uh, the audio experience that we can deliver and, you know, uh, attending to the,

25:26what at the time was a very long list of things that our customers were sort of explicitly asking us for. If, you know, if we were actually computatively, if we were working on a set top box in that moment, um, 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 they, when the thing that comes first is the model and the thing that comes second

25:58is the product. I certainly, uh, feel a sense of obligation to constantly be evaluating, um, 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? Um, and I'm not sure that they were saying we want a high-end streaming box that is sort of somehow the, the, the, the love child of a Apple TV and a Roku. Although that love child,

26:28I would be very worried about that love child. Um, 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? Let's set that aside. Um, we're at the turn, right? You, you came in, you restructured the company, you identified a new thesis for the company that 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 at mess? Do you think the brand has been restored? As we've been saying, I think that there's the

26:59quant and there's the qual that the quant is green across the board, you know, performance, reliability, uh, customer care interactions, social tone, NPS. These things are all restored to, 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, um, constructive conversation about things that they're excited that we're doing and things where we're still

27:32disappointing, you know, an individual customer on some dimension. Maybe this, this game is like never over. You're just always trying to, to, to polish off the remaining rough edges of everything that you do. And so, you know, I'm, I, I have a real critic's eye when I look at the work that we do. And, um, if I ever let that slip, a customer will remind me of, of, of where the work remains. Yes. I think in, in, in every, in every measurable way it's behind us, but it's a never forget kind of,

28:03um, chapter for the company.

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Introducing Sonos 27

31:45I 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 are calling an audio operating system that has something in it called Sonos Fabric. Boy, 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, 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

32:22this 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 where 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 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 this has 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? Yeah, let's get into it. Sonos 27, Sonos Fabric.

32:58What are these things? Explain to people what's going on here. 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 goal. 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 in its nuts and bolts. It's an ecosystem

33:33platform 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 key piece of hole. And architecturally, it's one of the things that's really, really unique about what we're doing. Our products in your home

34:06really 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 for pointing 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,

34:37which 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, which is 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. 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.

35:10The Beam Ultra is the new soundbar. And I think it's 7.1.2. This is very nerdy, but to me, it represents, oh, Atmos is like 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. I mean, it really, I mean, obviously I'm biased, I can see 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 a home theater podcast. Like where does my heart truly lie? It's that. It's just doing that. I'm down. Anytime. You need a co-host, we should do it.

35:43Look, I just judged the TV shootout and Sony lost. It's like a big deal. There's a lot going on in

Naming the Operating System

35:49that 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. 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 over time. 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,

36:26we'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 it improved through time. And so as we started thinking about, well, how do you really do that? The first thing they came to is like, gosh, we already have OS, like right in the name of the company. And so 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

37:00the product is 100% hardware and 100% software. The product is Sonos, not ARC. Like maybe the OS too 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. 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 descriptor for

37:35that was a better mechanism than almost anything else we thought that was available to us. 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 as they come into focus. Again, this is, I have a lot of questions on the nature of software development in 2027, but the idea that there's one monolithic release once a year, the industry has gotten away from that. Is that your idea or are you going to do something different? Fortunately, the industry has gotten away from

38:06that. 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. And as you'll see, even in this moment, that 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 sort of opt-ins for our customers, do that sort of perspective collecting, real-world data collecting sort of work. 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

38:41observers about, but what about this feature? And I think really the answer is just going to be like, we know the stuff. 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 in 28 or beyond. 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.

39:12You'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 is the biggest vision of this look like? 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

39:50stabilizer, 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 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. 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

40:25the customer want? And, you know, one of the new capabilities in Sonos 27 is our new voice assistant and our voice assistant. Um, yes, it's built on modern generative technology. Um, but it's really inspired by what people tell us that they like to see in the home. And I'll tell you that the killer app of the assistant is they just want to be able to talk to it like a normal

Next-Generation Voice Assistants

40:50person. Well, stop like, like the first generation of systems, 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 twin singer, I think the song ended up like as the theme song for that show. It was on Fox. It was called the curmudgeonly docked house and just had the thing. It's teardrop by massive attack. I know they took it off the streaming. It's a real, it's a real, it's sad.

41:24It is, it is. So that's kind of job one, if you like, and the first generation of systems didn't do it at all. Sona's 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

41:55want comprehensive role knowledge. I want 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 get perspectives on the world. And in some instances, those perspectives are, allow them to use 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

42:29on TikTok to sort that against my musical preferences and deliver it. And then, you know, I guess while we're, while we're numerating 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 kind of responsible and affordable to run. I mean, I think, I do think that, that good customers want this as a fundamental capability of, of a product like Sonos. And, um, uh, we built an architecture that allows us to deliver it, um, to every one of our customers. There's a lot of big decoder, big verge ideas in all of their, all the way down to where does the

42:59compute 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 Jen Tuis, our smart home reporter has suggested you don't think it's ready. This is a lot of stacked problems. And I'm just going to read your press release to you. It says Sonos 27 MCP allows you to

43:34connect any outside AI assistant or agent to your system, including chat GPT. 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. You know, in many ways we have a, a, a, a, a strong relationship with Google to this day, despite the lawsuit. Uh, YouTube music is, it's one of the most listened to music services on the platform. We do have a long history of,

44:07of a first-generation Google assistant, you know, on many of our products. We'd love to continue to work with them, um, uh, on all of these things and those conversations continue.

Custom Agents and MCP Support

44:17I guess I'm just going to push on this. Connect any AI assistant or agent. There, 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. I want to tease apart two different things. Um, there's, um, let's talk about, uh, command and control of the 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 chat GPT on the web, on your

44:48phone, on the desktop, um, uh, in the same way that, uh, 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 claw and clawed in chat GPT in Brock. Um, so, and by connecting that tool into your experience, however you access it, you'll be able to summon Sonos. Maybe you're working along on something and you want some music to play. You just tell clawed to make it play or

45:20just 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. Um, you know, as we see these, these kind of, you know, open claw style, agentic, proactive, asynchronous kind of, um, 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 CLIs for Sonos around that many, you know, a lot of reporting about how they're among the most, you know, utilized sort of examples for these things or excited to, to officially

45:51support such a thing as much as fun as it is to see the mainstream use cases. Um, very excited to see what hobbyists are going to do with Sonos MCP. So let's not talk about like on device though, on our devices. Um, so we've, 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. Um, I'm excited about it. Don't have anything to announce today, but, um, uh, we've had a long and really successful relationship with, with Amazon through the years. Panos was on the board with me for many of, uh, our

46:25years at Sonos. Yeah. By the way, that's just so people know that's Panos Panay who now runs hardware and Alexa at Amazon. That's right. That's right. Um, friend of the show. Yes. He, yeah. Panos and I are buds too. Yep. We're going to demonstrate, uh, something we call Sonos custom agents, which lets you take, um, any of these, uh, inference engines, the, the Anthropic engine, the, the OpenAI engine, Gemini engine, the Grok engine, and, um, uh, invoke it from Sonos. Um, and, uh, you'll be able to give it a unique voice. You'll be able to give it a name

47:00and 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 as interested in like, like, uh, kind of subtly shading your perspectives in music and, and, uh, but also making recommendations. You can, uh, you'll be able to go in, uh, uh, set up a custom agent in Sonos

47:31that says, you know, uh, let's use, uh, OpenAI inference. Let's use this voice I pick, um, and let's give it this personality and let's have it live alongside an agent that's powered by anthropic inference. Um, that's gonna, uh, that, uh, is gonna be, give me advice on cooking. Um, 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,

48:03uh, inside of Sonos, um, invoke by the name you give it. Hey, 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 context, um, uh, so that, uh, uh, they can sort of hand off from one to the other. Today's social engineering attacks look trustworthy by design disguised as a routine request,

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50:17Powders han sido diseñados científicamente para ayudarte a mejorar el balance de hidratación en el cuerpo. Hechos con la mezcla número uno de electrolitos sin colores ni sabores artificiales. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Signos de de hidratación leve y moderada. Consulta a tu médico si los síntomas persisten. Let me bring some of these together. There's the idea that there's external command and control,

50:50right? 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 plus 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 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

51:23going to happen locally? Are we sending everything to the cloud 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 new HomePod with an AI-enabled Siri and

51:58they 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 a 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, 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?

Home Automation and Ecosystems

52:31And then how do you solve just like the capability gap that every other company has run into? I think that we, as an industry, 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 went through a chapter where the infrastructure became, you know, Linux and open

53:08source for your data tier. And then of course, we've had this huge long run of cloud infrastructure. And I think, you know, if you're a company that builds your stack on Solaris and Oracle, 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 voice assistants that are going through the transition of first

53:42generation 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 AI, 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

54:16agentic tool use powered by protocols like MCP are going to 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 audio in the home. We've 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

54:48different protocols with 17 different, you know, hubs in the closet. Well, I mean, part of the opportunity there is you don't have the big voice assistant. I don't think the current Sonos voice assistant is not at the scale of Alexa or Google or assistant, right? I'm just guessing. They do have that problem. Like 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. 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 smart home.

55:20All of those dependencies exist for those platforms for reasons. And 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. And 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, 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

55:54they're MCP-driven. It should not matter. There's just a bunch of devices on 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. And 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. It walked through my network,

56:25and the shades can 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 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. 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. And so while there is,

57:00as 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. And so I do think that because of the profound technological step function of agentic control, these kinds of services and things like tool use, that as the consumer catches up with the industry's ambition to solve these problems, that new technological solutions will emerge.

57:31And I'm really excited about how I think 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. And of course, Lutron is a great partner and they do a great job with this. They do. I mean, we have them. We got all kinds of light switches. We mostly have Lutron ones. But that's kind of my question is the first natural customer for something like what you're

58:06describing 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, you know, Creative Labs MP3 players before the iPod came along? 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, you know, 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?

58:38Is 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? And you're kind of describing if you want music, you're going to talk to Sonos. But you also have a general purpose assistant like Claude or ChatCBT 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 going to have one chatbot that does everything and all

59:09the demand is aggregated there and, I don't know, OpenAI becomes more powerful than ever? Or are we going to have lots and lots of assistance 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. For 20 years, we've found a lot of success around the idea of embracing sort of every dimension of the problem. You know, yes, there's an app, but you're welcome to engage with us through Airplay or

59:41Spotify Connect. Yes, we have a voice assistant, but it lives side by side with Alexa. Yes, we have proprietary mesh, but it integrates with Bluetooth and even line in. And I think our bet is that we're going to, you know, we're about a size and scale that allows us to both be nimble and react to these changes, but also have enough horsepower to sort of keep up technologically with the best in the category you're doing. So, you know, I think some of this just plays out on the field. And just one last idea, since you said it a couple of times, this question about like, where does the compute live?

1:00:14I 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. And 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 the boxes?

1:00:44I think the answer is yes. And 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 a sort of 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 nineties, early two thousands, there was a vision that we would all have home servers in our basements and they would do all the logic of our home.

1:01:18They 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 in the smart home. You know, I've got a bunch of automations in my house and the garage are open, the lights turn on and other stuff happens at night. You know,

1:01:52the 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 off. Yeah. Um, this is not anything to do with 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 going to turn on? Yeah. You don't want to, yeah. You don't want to be the

1:02:24partner that put in the internet connected light switches that don't work when the internet is down. you're going to get, but it's not just the internet connected light switches. It's the logic of making it all work together. Yeah. There for 40 years now, we've been talking about technology for the home. Um, and yeah, starting with the personal computer, which is supposed to be some, the center of the technological household, but we didn't really get that. We got laptops that people, you know, you mostly use at work and, um, use a bit of the home. And then, and then we got

1:02:57mobile, mobile is supposed to be the thing that you engage with when you leave your house, um, uh, on your way to work. And of course it, the, 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 spouse has ever said, I wish my husband was on his phone more. Um, I wish my kid used their iPad more. And so

1:03:28we'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, uh, set top 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, 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.

1:04:01Um, we'll figure it out over time. I feel like you're, you're this close to being like,

Mesh Networks and Audio Systems

1:04:05and then the Teslas will be a data center. Like there's something there that is like maybe the line. I actually want to, to push on that a little bit. The initial Sonos innovation a hundred 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. So 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. Still, I mean, candidly, still with a lot of, a lot of what our, our, our,

1:04:35our software team does day in and day out is, is extend and, and, and maintain that, that infrastructure. There's features you're announcing here as part of Fabric that I think are interesting, right? If you have surrounds, you can just place them and they'll figure out that their 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

1:05:07more capabilities? 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 do feel like 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

1:05:38you'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 mesh, a fabric of, of compute that, 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 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

1:06:13consumers 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. Um, and that's just the way it goes. Uh, and 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 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 in your body in some way.

1:06:44You 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 like 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 the, 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

Redesigning Sonos Ace Headphones

1:07:09headphones is going to tell you, can I tell you a little bit about the new headphones? Yeah, of course. 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 it doesn't matter. So we launched Sonos Ace two years ago. I think measured against any of the other premium, over-ear, noise-canceling headphones in the market. They're a great product. They've got great reviews. They have great noise-canceling. They're super comfortable. They look great.

1:07:43Really 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. I think it was the most visible expression of the missed opportunity of that moment 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, I mean,

1:08:14you would do 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 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. And the model through which you invoke your headphones has to be completely seamless and delightful. And so we built an entirely new hardware platform for Ace Ultra called Headphone

1:08:45Engine 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 headphone, which doesn't have the horsepower to run the full stack, would kill battery life, etc. 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

1:09:16music will jump from the speaker into your headphone. 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. 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, we're making all of our portable

1:09:49speakers, Sonos Play, Sonos Move, capable of being rear channels for home theater. And that sounds really easy. It's like, maybe people will 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. And so for a speaker to seamlessly hop between

1:10:23being 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 is ultrasonic signaling to broadcast the room. Hey, is there a soundbar here? Ultrasonic comes back saying, I'm here. They negotiate position, left, right, distance, so that they

1:10:57can optimize the surround sound experience. You pick it up again, you take it back to the kitchen and it's regular speaker again. All happens magically, no use of the app. It's pretty cool. To 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, and you can just say, show me what I'm looking at, and a picture will be taken automatically and something will happen. We'll all get over the privacy implication of that. But that's a collapse of the headphone market. Maybe. Headphones come in all kinds of form factors today over your in-ear cuffs,

1:11:31wireless, wired. 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? 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 adventurous, wackadoodle consumer electronics

1:12:04that are connected to this new emerging AI universe. Most of them will be a swing and the miss. Of course, we've already seen some of those. So it's 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? 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

1:12:39away. And you have a bunch of medium Bluetooth competitors, 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-canceling products from Bose and Sony and whoever. And that is the airplane set. And 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 integrate AI in very specific ways directly into their operating system.

1:13:13We'll see how that plays out. 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? 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 sort of notable that

1:13:46something like the metaglasses 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. No, I'm very curious to see how that plays out. It doesn't seem like it's in focus. Again, probably because, like you say, none of the products are in focus. Like no one knows what

1:14:21hit product here looks like. So you might as well let a thousand flowers bloom and then radically construct the market. That seems like what everyone is doing, but something there is going to be a turn that happens here. Tom, I've burned just a ton of your time. I think you can tell I could

Future Roadmap and Closing

1:14:37talk 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? 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 OS 27 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 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

1:15:07feedback, and we'll be able to observe the telemetry 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 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. That's great. All right. I got to ask you at the end, I have ceiling speakers in my kitchen. They're connected to a Sonos app. There's a Google Home Hub right there, and it's broken. I can't ask it to

1:15:41play 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. I'd love to figure it out for you. I know the right folks to call, so let's get you connected. Yeah, we're going to have a Dakota roundtable. Yeah, 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,

1:16:12and then we're going to talk about what it took to fix it. That's the plan. Tom, this was great. Thank you so much, man. Super fun. Thank you.

1:16:20I'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 decoderattheverge.com. 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. I'm part of the Vox Union Podcast Network. Show's producers are Greg Ott, Kay Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Sona. We'll see you next time.

1:16:54We'll see you next time.