Sonos gets free upgrades this week – I've been waiting years for this one

Sonos is beginning a big month for its app experience, rolling out a surprisingly wide array of tweaks and upgrades that add some welcome new features that it's lacked for years.

The most immediate, which comes today if your app and speakers are all up to date, is the addition of a preset system to let you queue up playlists for every occasion, on a room-by-room basis.

The app basically lets you create mood-suiting setups, so that you could, for instance, tap a button to get your favourite background music loaded up at the same tastefully low volume whenever you have guests round for dinner or drinks.

Equally, you might have an actual party playlist that gets a little more hectic, and which takes in every speaker in your house to ensure that people can dance no matter what room they're in.

That's not the only tweak coming – Sonos is also adding more dashboard-style information about your system in the app, which will also flag whether any device in each system needs attention (whether that's because of networking issues or something else). This will arrive sometime in November.

Finally, also coming in mid-November is a beta version of what it's calling Sonos 27voice, the latest version of the voice control software that it's using. Early Access users in the US should get this from 6 November before it rolls out more widely in 2027.

It promises far more conversational interactions with your voice controls – so that vague instructions are far more successful in setting up playlists or musical vibes.

The big difference here is that the previous version of Voice Control runs entirely locally, while 27voice is cloud-based. Thankfully, Sonos is letting people stick with the older, local model if they prefer, so you don't have to upgrade if you fancy maintaining stricter privacy standards.

It'll be fascinating to see how this series of app upgrades goes, but Sonos seems to be taking things far more carefully nowadays. It obviously knows how badly updates can go when they're rushed, so this Early Access approach seems to be a far more conservative and sensible way about things.

I use my Beam Ultra and Era 100s every single day, though, so I'm extremely curious to see how these updates feel to use, and will report back.