4 November 2026

Sonos tests new voice assistant, for now only in the U.S.

Sonos has begun testing Sonos 27voice, a new voice assistant that takes commands in plain language, the way you would talk to a person, 9to5Mac reports. After saying “Hey Sonos,” you can ask, for example, for “that Bowie album about an adventure in space,” without naming the title, or simply ask a question. You can sign up in the Sonos app, but only in the U.S., and spots are limited. Access for the first testers was scheduled for November 6, and the company wants to roll the assistant out to all customers in 2027.

9to5Mac ↗

From recent days

Gemini 4 Carbon edges out Claude Opus 5.5 by one point in Artificial Analysis ranking

Google's new model, Gemini 4 Carbon, has taken first place in the AI model ranking run by Artificial Analysis, Tom's Hardware reports. It scored 59 points, one more than Claude Opus 5.5 and two more than GPT-6 Astra. It is also cheaper than Opus: it completes a single test task for $7.76, compared with $10.04 for Opus. It also came out on top in a test that measures how much a model knows and how often it makes things up. For now, Google is making it available only to select cybersecurity teams.

Tom's Hardware ↗

Hugging Face CEO: the biggest AI risk comes from a few companies working behind closed doors

Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, believes the biggest AI-related risk is created by a handful of large companies building models in secret. Speaking at the WIRED World Fair in Miami on November 4, he argued that the best protection is developing AI in the open, where anyone can build models. In his view, whoever deploys an AI agent should be legally responsible for what it does. He put the risk of AI leading to human extinction at close to zero.

Wired ↗

Claude deleted a law professor's year of lecture notes and his syllabus

Claude deleted a University of Chicago professor's notes for a year-long constitutional law course along with his current syllabus, Tom's Hardware reports. William Baude had only asked it to fix the page numbers in old notes, and when he came back from lunch he read that the model had deleted the files by mistake. He recovered them from a Dropbox backup. He described the incident on X on November 5 as a warning to others. It is not known which version of Claude he was using.

Tom's Hardware ↗

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