Last week we reported on Sonos’s big software announcement, including a feature called ‘custom agents’ that would let people “create their own [AI] agents through the system, each with its own model, persona and voice”.
Now CEO Tom Conrad has been talking in a bit more depth about how that will work, including how it could be used for music recommendations, in an interview with The Verge’s ‘Decoder’ podcast.
The feature will let listeners “take any of these inference engines — the Anthropic engine, the OpenAI engine, the Gemini engine, the Grok engine — and invoke it from Sonos” according to Conrad.
“You’ll be able to give it a unique voice, give it a name, and give it a context that has it show up in a particular way,” he added.
“So imagine that you’d like to have a personality that lives inside of Sonos, and it’s the John Cusack character from High Fidelity, an opinionated record store geek who is interested in subtly shading your perspectives in music, but also making recommendations.”
“You’ll be able to go in and set up a custom agent in Sonos that says, “Let’s use OpenAI inference. Let’s use this voice I pick, and let’s give it this personality, and let’s have it live alongside an agent that’s powered by Anthropic inference that is going to give me advice on cooking. And let’s do another one that is only interested in connecting me with opportunities to see live music…”