Lights that turn on from the command of your phone — or your voice — are the next big thing in the growing world of home automation.
Philips Hue, a popular smart lighting system from Philips Lighting that can be controlled through both phones and one’s voice, is being expanded to include a series of wall-mounted and standalone outdoor LED lights. The light bulbs, which will be synced to the Hue Bridge cloud system, will connect outdoor lights to a larger system of home devices.
Philips originally announced the release of the smart lights back in January. But this week, the company issued a press release giving more details on just how the new lighting system will work. Using the international wireless standard known as Zigbee — also employed by many other smart devices–the outdoor Hue lamps can be connected to any Amazon Alexa voice assistant device and be programmed to turn on automatically in a range of dim or bright settings.
“While Philips Hue bulbs and luminaires are available for every area inside your home, we wanted to traverse the threshold and offer connected luminaires designed for outside areas,” said Sridhar Kumaraswamy, Philips’ Business Leader Home Systems & Luminaries.
A Philips representative told Inman that the lights will be available in both color and white and will be released in the US and Europe this summer (Philips’ press release says the lights will be able to display up to 16 million colors). The styles and colours of the outdoor lighting products will remain the same as the indoor range, the representative said.
With prices that start at $29.99 USD for a simple lamp and go up to $279.99 USD for an entire system, the different lighting options can all be connected to a single home device.
In the last few months, smart home systems have been making waves. After rolling out its smartphone entry system Amazon Key in October, Amazon recently announced plans to buy smart doorbell company Ring.