Smarter lighting
MAKE YOUR SMART LIGHTS EVEN BRIGHTER BY LINKING THEM.
ONE OF THE true joys of smart lights is being able to control them with your voice and although the HomePod, the Echo and the Home allow you to turn lights on and off directly, many smart light systems will let you do much more if you’re willing to integrate a third-party automation app to the equation. We use IFTTT a lot, but Stringify is a good alternative, and there’s a bunch of other automation applications that are worth a look as well.
IFTTT combined with a smart lighting system will allow you to do significantly more than just turn lights on and off. Sure, you could set up a command to dim the lights, but with Philips Hue bulbs and the Google Assistant you can push this significantly further by setting up commands with numerical quantifiers like, “turn living room lights to # per cent”, so that you can make it exactly as bright as you want it on the fly. To do this, go to the ‘New applet’ area of IFTTT, find Google Assistant in the ‘Trigger services’ section, add the ‘Say a phrase with a number’, fill out the spoken command replacing the number with # and then select Hue as the action service. The second half of the equation involves adding a ‘Dim lights’ action to the recipe, selecting the desired light and then adding the number field ingredient to the brightness percentage field. It might take a while to set up, but if you want to really push your smart home it’s one of the more versatile functions we’ve experimented with.
If you’re looking for more useful commands to customise for your lighting then there is a lot to be said about creating lighting scenes using IFTTT. Whether you’ve got full LED coloured bulbs, tweakable white lights or just dimmable lighting arrays, setting up some preconfigured lighting levels will help you create the perfect ambience with a single command. Each configuration will differ slightly in how you set it up, but most will get you to create a scene or use a preconfigured lighting recipe that you can link to your smart speaker. TP-Link’s smart light bulbs are controlled by the Kasa app, for example, which lets you create scenes that map a number of bulbs and their lighting conditions to a custom-named scenario. This could include dimmed living room lights for a ‘movie’, warm candlelight in the dining room for ‘dinner’, energising white lights for the ‘office’ or non-blue light colouring for your bedside lamps in the lead up to ‘bedtime’. If you create these scenes in the Kasa app, you can link them to your smart assistant using one of the recommended IFTTT applets for Kasa: ‘If you say XX activate XX scene’.
WHETHER YOU’VE GOT LED COLOURED BULBS, TWEAKABLE WHITE LIGHTS OR JUST DIMMABLE LIGHTING ARRAYS, SETTING UP SOME PRE-CONFIGURED LIGHTING LEVELS WILL HELP YOU CREATE THE PERFECT AMBIENCE WITH A SINGLE COMMAND.