Smart lighting can come in handy in lots of day-to-day situations. You can dim the light in the living room with a single finger swipe, without getting up from the sofa. Or you can create individual room profiles for different circumstances and activate them remotely whenever you like.
Smart lighting solutions are not only accessible via smartphone, but can be managed by voice as well. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to set it up. We’ll be using Osram LIGHTIFY and Amazon Alexa as examples, but you can choose from voice control interfaces such as Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri, and smart lighting solutions like Philips Hue, the Osram LIGHTIFY successor, LIGHTIFY/SMART+, or the Innr products. The setup follows the same principle with only slight, if any, differences between the brands.
Connecting your smart light with your voice assistant
In this case, we want to connect the Alexa interface to the LIGHTIFY system. In order to communicate with Alexa, you’ll need a speaker that supports the voice assistant. In this case, we’re using the Smart Speaker P3 by ONKYO. Next, connect the speaker to your local network and to your smartphone, and download the Alexa app.
The Alexa app contains a small app store in itself. From this inventory, you can upload so-called “skills” to the app, i.e. the abilities you want Alexa to pick up. Go to the “Skills” tab in the Alexa app and browse for LIGHTIFY. Select the Osram LIGHTIFY ability and click to activate. As you have already set up an account while installing LIGHTIFY, you can now easily link up your smart lighting products to Alexa – simply sign into the Alexa app with your LIGHTIFY account login. From now on, you’ll also be able to add and control new LIGHTIFY products with the voice assistant. All groups and lighting settings saved to your LIGHTIFY app can be now managed with Alexa as well. The last step is naming the connected devices and lighting groups. You have two options: either keep the names you chose when you set up the LIGHTIFY app, or alternatively generate new Alexa groups such as “ground floor”, “dining room” or “bedroom”. Now you can control all your LIGHTIFY products by voice.
Your options for voice control
“Alexa, turn on the living room light”, “Alexa, lights out in the bedroom“, or “Alexa, sofa lights on“. These are a few simple examples of voice commands you can give to control the lighting in your home. If you are using dimmable LEDs by Osram LIGHTIFY, you have even more options to customise. You can choose the following voice commands, for example: “Alexa, dim the lights in the living room by 30 percent”, “Alexa, turn on ‘TV evening’” or “Alexa, darken the bedroom”. It’s possible that Alexa will not be able to understand every command issued the first time round, but she will learn your commands with time and follow them even quicker. If you created different lighting profiles and ask the assistant to start one, usually the profile lights will not be switched on all at once, but rather one by one. Depending on the amount of devices in the group, it can take a few seconds until the selected light profile is fully activated.
Relax and let your smart lighting system do the work
Once you’ve set up the voice control of your smart light, you don´t even have to reach for your smartphone to activate your preferred lighting mode. A simple command is now all you need. With LIGHTIFY/SMART+ you can connect up to 50 devices, which you can then manage with ease by voice.
