The Sonos Beam[1] is a new $399 soundbar, but to Sonos, it's a heck of a lot more than just a speaker that sits under your television. It's a fabric-wrapped representation of how Sonos sees the future—one in which all the voice assistants from Apple and Google and Amazon can live next to one another. In this future, hip urban millennials parents will use Beam not just for Netflixing and HBOing, but queuing up the soundtracks to their hip, urban lives and for controlling their hip, urban smart home. And they'll do it all with spoken commands instead of an app or a remote.
Development on the Beam has been going on for more than two years (during which time the speaker was referred to internally as "El Rey," Spanish for "The King"). And it's being released at a critical time for Sonos: It's been reported that the 16-year-old audio company will soon file to go public. Sonos has also just laid off almost 100 employees[2], or around six percent of its workforce. Patrick Spence, the company's relatively new CEO, inherited a perception of the company–one rooted in reality–that it was slow to react to the Amazon Echo and slow to release new products in general. Sonos products are pricey, and the company has been feeling pressure from the low end of the smart speaker market.
The microphones on top are for talking to your preferred voice assistant.
Beth Holzer for Wired
But that's not the end of the speaker market Sonos wants to play in, even if this new Beam costs significantly less than Sonos's two previous soundbars and also works with Alexa. Spence sees things like the Amazon Echo Dot as "stepping stones" to...