After 13 Years, Sonos Adds Presets. Its New Voice Arrives Friday

If your house runs on Sonos, two things changed this week. Presets, a feature owners have been asking for since 2013, according to Analytics Insight, began rolling out on 3 November. And Sonos 27voice, the brand’s new conversational assistant, opens for early-access requests in the United States on 6 November, Engadget reports.

Presets: one tap, the whole house

A preset saves which music plays in which room, on which speakers and at what volume. What Hi-Fi gives the obvious uses: one for a party, one for the morning, one for a slow Sunday. You can keep up to 50, and they follow your account to any phone or tablet. Both new features need S2 speakers running Sonos 27, the yearly software release that arrived a few weeks ago. What presets will not do, for now:

• Save non-music settings, such as switching to TV audio or muting every speaker.
• Respond to voice commands.
• Work in the Sonos web app.

27voice: smarter, but it lives in the cloud

Sonos 27voice understands natural requests. Sonos’s own example is “play that Bowie album about an adventure in space”. It also sets timers, gives the weather, controls supported smart-home accessories and answers general questions. Early access is US English only: you request it in the Sonos app, not every household will be picked, and there is a wait between signing up and getting in. It is free on supported speakers with a microphone, and a wider release is planned for 2027.

Convenience and privacy sit on the same dial. Decide where you want it before you say the wake word.

The practical part is privacy. The older assistant, renamed Classic Sonos Voice Control for testers, processes commands on the speaker. With 27voice, wake-word detection still happens locally, but after “Hey Sonos” your request goes to Sonos’s cloud, and some open-ended questions go to third-party AI services, Sonos says on its community forum. The company says it deletes recordings and transcripts once a request is fulfilled, and advises against saying passwords, account numbers or medical details. A system runs one assistant at a time; you switch under Settings, General Settings, Voice Assistants.