US Patent Issued to Sonos on March 11 for "Portable playback devices with network operation modes" (Washington, Massachusetts, California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,250,530, issued on March 11, was assigned to Sonos Inc. (Goleta, Calif.).

"Portable playback devices with network operation modes" was invented by Sangah Park (Somerville, Mass.), Ryan Myers (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and John Tolomei (Renton, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Examples described herein relate to portable playback devices, such as smart headphones and earbuds, and ultra-portable devices having built-in voice assistants. Some example techniques relate to user interaction with voice assistants. Further example techniques relate to voice guidance played back by the headphones to guide the user under certain conditions."

Th...