Alexa turn on the lights okay hi guys my name is Jonathan from smart home sounds
we're a home audio retailer dedicated to finding the right speakers for our
customers today is going to be a little bit different because I'm going to be
showing you how Philips Hue smart lights and Sonos speakers can work together to
control the lighting and the music via Amazon Alexa voice control bringing you
one step closer to a smart home so if you're not already aware Philips hue
lets you set the perfect scene using lighting all controlled from a handy app
or using your voice if you have a voice assisted speaker such as the Sonos one
or the Sonos beam if you have a color ambience bulb you can also choose from 16
million different colors on a hue which will then help you select the perfect
scene and then save it using your voice assisted speaker you can ask it to do
things like dim the lights or choose a specific color or choose a safe seen
from the philips hue app and much much more
all without touching anything you can even automate the process so your
favorite scene is already present at a certain time maybe when you walk in from
work your voice assistant can either come from something like an Amazon echo
or a Google home device but today we're using it with the Sonos one or you can
use it with a Sonos beam because they both have Amazon Alexa and Google
assistant built-in so you can choose your favorite one out of those two to
get the most out of the philips hue bulbs or use them via a Sonos speaker
you will need to use them with a philips hue bridge and that makes all of your
bulbs Wi-Fi enabled it also unlocks many more features such as away-from-home
control go to sleep and wake up routines timers schedules and that sort of thing
you can also add a dimmer switch if you're looking for a physical switch
that you can use anywhere in your home or use it like a portable remote control
for your lights so how much do the Philips Hue smart lights cost well they're
best bought as part of a bundle offer but to give you an example the cost of the
philips hue bridge plus a pair of color bulbs with the dimmer switch would cost
one hundred and sixty nine ninety-nine but once you have the
to bridge it's really simple to add more bulbs in the future so if you're looking
to add another white light bulb that would cost you $14.99 or if you're
looking for another color ambient bulb that would cost $49.99 what I'll do is
pop links to any live offers in the description below so you know you'll
always be getting the very best deal on your Philips Hue smart lights so to set
Philips Hue smart lights up you'll first want to make sure each of your bulbs are
powered on and if you're using a Philips hue bridge you'll want to connect that
to mains power and then connect it directly to your router via ethernet and
then wait for the three lights on it to start showing blue then you'll just need
to download the Philips Hue app and follow the on-screen instructions which
are fairly straightforward then if you want to link your Philips Hue with a
voice assistant such as Amazon Alexa or Google assistant you'll need to go into
those respective apps and enable Philips hue as a skill the app should then
automatically find your bulbs and then you can begin naming your bulbs and
assigning them to rooms if you want a full guide into setting up the Philips
Hue lights with Sonos and also integrating the voice assistant with
them then I'll pop a link to our full guide in the description below and you
can check out more information about that to be honest the setup is a little
bit fiddly and we struggle to find any help online about this for example we
didn't realize that you couldn't use a lamp which came with a dimmer switch
because the Philips hue lights always require 100% power you're also juggling
between three different apps so you've got the Sonos app the philips hue app
and the voice assistant's own app so it is a little bit easy to get lost but now
that we've got it all set up we've created the guide for you so it should
be fairly easy to go through all the steps so hopefully that will help you
out so now that it's all set up it is really straightforward to use you
can either use the Philips Hue app the voice assistant that you've selected or
you can actually go for the dimmer switch which is a physical switch if you
prefer to have physical buttons so let's show you some examples and have a bit of
fun with it Alexa turn on the lights okay okay
that's quite bright Alexa dim the lights okay okay that's nice
Alexa change the brightness to 100% in the office okay so that's back to full
brightness you can also set it to a specific color so Alexa change the color
of the office lights to green okay oh that's really nice nice little smart
home sounds green Alexa turn on savanna sunset in the office okay that's really
nice yeah that's really nice for more I can imagine doing a lot of work to that
Alexa turn on energized in the office okay that's really nice as well yeah
that's good Alexa turn off the lights okay so another good feature about the
philips hue lights worth mentioning is hue sync and that means that you can
sync your lights with the video that you're watching or the music that you're
listening to so this will create a really nice ambient effect and
essentially make whatever you're watching or listening to much more
immersive so I'm going to show you how that works now
so in theory this is a good feature but in practice it's not ideal and it's not
quite there yet because as you'll have noticed I needed to play the video
directly from the laptop itself and that is because hue sync is only available as
a desktop app or a laptop app you cannot use a smartphone or a tablet to directly
to control Philip's Hue sync now you as a workaround you can connect the laptop
directly to the TV via HDMI and then you can you can watch it on the
big screen but what I would like to see is a full integration from Sonos in the
future now this would be quite a good feature for gamers who are maybe using a
separate monitor and then you can actually have the game and the lights in
sync on a on a big screen and especially if you if you're using a Sonos beam
because then you'll have immersive sound and also immersive lighting the Philips
hue smart lights also work with the newly released IKEA Symfonisk lamp so
if you're not sure of what that is is essentially a lamp with a Sonos speaker
built-in but it can also take a Philips hue smart light so you can control it by
the Philips hue app now one thing to bear in mind is that it doesn't have the
voice enabled services built into it so you would need if you are looking to use
it with voice then you would need to use it with a separate Sonos one or Sonos
beam or alternatively a separate Amazon echo or Google home device so overall I
am really impressed with how Sonos and Philips Hue can work with each
other obviously there are some improvements to make along the way which
hopefully we do see resolved but overall I do think this is the future of the
smart home so hopefully this video did help you to see some of the cool things
that you can do with Sonos and Philips Hue if you are interested in
getting your hands on Sonos or Philips hue I will pop a link to the products in
the description below as well as any live offers that you might be interested
in thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe and like the video and I'll
see you soon
you