Sonos unveils Ace Ultra headphones and Beam Ultra soundbar with AI features

Sonos CEO Tom Conrad led a presentation in which the firm launched the Ace Ultra headphones and Beam Ultra soundbar, accompanied by a suite of software enhancements for the Sonos 27 operating system. Attendees experienced the Beam Ultra alone, with Play speakers as rear surrounds, and with the Ace Ultra headphones, noting strong bass and clear dialogue even without a subwoofer. The new Sonos Fabric technology automatically linked additional Play speakers to create a more immersive surround field.

The Ace Ultra can pull audio from any Sonos speaker and switch playback between rooms with a single button press. Sonos also showcased an upgraded voice assistant capable of nuanced natural-language requests and demonstrated compatibility with external AI models such as Claude and ChatGPT via an open model context protocol. A preview of custom AI agents, including a French-chef persona, illustrated future personalization options, though these features are not yet released. Overall, the hardware performed well, with the headphones offering effective noise cancellation and the soundbar delivering impressive spatial audio in a compact form factor.