Sonos will be making new product announcements in September. The news came as part of the company’s third quarter financial call (although we learned about it in Janko Roettgers’ newsletter Lowpass). CEO and Director Thomas Conrad, who assumed the helm of the company officially almost exactly a year ago after an interim phase, spoke about Sonos’ next steps and set the stage for AI to be a core part of its business strategy.

He argued that the battles over the best and fastest model won’t be the defining factor for success when it comes to AI in the smart home. “The lasting value is going to be in what surrounds the model in a real home, the hardware that can converse with quality across every room, the system that already knows the shape of a home and the way a family lives in it, the connectivity to reach the speakers, services and devices that turn a request into coordinated action,” Conrad said. “That’s the operating environment for AI in the home, and Sonos has spent 20 years building it.”

Sonos has a history of being an agnostic player in smart home tech, with its speakers able to interface with voice assistants from multiple different companies rather than designing an in-house one. It has also promised better performance and specs than the budget options on the market from major brands like Amazon and Google, which have also been pushing the AI angle for their hardware.

Lately however, Sonos hasn’t been doing too much on the product side while it continues to recover from a disastrous app redesign in 2024 that saw steep cuts to staff and executive leadership. Trying to immediately tackle AI-powered smart home audio could be a make or break moment for the company.