Joseph Brown
Member
Sonos has an event lined up for September and the only thing anyone has to work with is the language: conversational computing and predictive intelligence. No category, no specs, nothing about what the device actually is.
I have no idea what it is and neither does anybody writing about it, so take all of this as a reaction rather than a leak. But those two phrases point away from a speaker and towards an assistant device, or at least a speaker sold on its assistant rather than its drivers. For this company in particular, that is a choice.
The context is what makes it interesting. Sonos spent 2024 breaking its app in a rewrite, burned through a chunk of the goodwill it had spent two decades building, shipped headphones into the middle of the mess, and changed CEO on the other side of it. The lesson most of us took was that the hardware was never the problem. The software was, and the software is where the trust has to be rebuilt. Leading the comeback with a device defined by prediction and voice puts the whole thing back on software.
There is also a question nobody has answered: whose assistant? Sonos has run Alexa, Google Assistant and its own voice control alongside each other, with support drifting around over the years. A device built on conversational computing that leans on a partner platform is one contract renegotiation away from being an ordinary speaker.
If it lands at typical Sonos money with an assistant as the headline feature, does anyone here bite, or has the app episode made that a no for a few more years yet?
I have no idea what it is and neither does anybody writing about it, so take all of this as a reaction rather than a leak. But those two phrases point away from a speaker and towards an assistant device, or at least a speaker sold on its assistant rather than its drivers. For this company in particular, that is a choice.
The context is what makes it interesting. Sonos spent 2024 breaking its app in a rewrite, burned through a chunk of the goodwill it had spent two decades building, shipped headphones into the middle of the mess, and changed CEO on the other side of it. The lesson most of us took was that the hardware was never the problem. The software was, and the software is where the trust has to be rebuilt. Leading the comeback with a device defined by prediction and voice puts the whole thing back on software.
There is also a question nobody has answered: whose assistant? Sonos has run Alexa, Google Assistant and its own voice control alongside each other, with support drifting around over the years. A device built on conversational computing that leans on a partner platform is one contract renegotiation away from being an ordinary speaker.
If it lands at typical Sonos money with an assistant as the headline feature, does anyone here bite, or has the app episode made that a no for a few more years yet?
