GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Philips Hue’s AI assistant can now build automations based on natural language, letting you describe what you want your lights to do. The feature, called Custom AI Behaviors, goes beyond simply changing colors or creating a scene and lets users orchestrate complex automations that weren’t previously achievable in the Hue app.
Announced at a press event at the IFA tech show this week, Custom AI Behaviors joins a new integration with Sonos speakers. Users can control Sonos speakers with select Hue switches, including the Hue Tap Dial Switch, to trigger Favorites, play or pause audio, adjust the volume, and move to the next or previous song in a playlist. It will be available via a software update in November.
Custom AI Behaviors allow you to use natural language to control all the capabilities of devices connected to your Hue lighting system.
Many advanced Hue users probably already have sophisticated automations to control their lights, but they didn’t set them up in the Hue app, which is fairly limited beyond basic automations based around time of day. Hue’s head of technology, George Yianni, said this was mostly due to the UI complexity required to present these more advanced automations, not limitations in the technology.
With Custom AI Behaviors, you’ll be able to tell the Hue AI Assistant in the app what you want. For example, when I’m asleep, turn on any lights triggered at nightlight setting; when I’m awake, use normal time-based color temperature. The system requires an input to know whether you’re awake or asleep (such as pressing a button to trigger a sleep or wake routine), but it can figure out the rest from there.
Custom AI Behaviors requires the processing power of the Bridge Pro, and won’t work on other Hue bridges.
You can also use Custom AI Behaviors to program Hue’s switches, which can be a fiddly process. One scenario demoed included asking the system to program button 4 on the Hue dimmer switch to disable the dining room motion sensor. This sounds like a great way to stop your lights turning on every 5 minutes while you’re watching TV because your dog is pacing, speaking from experience.
“This is not AI for the sake of AI; it’s a practical application of the technology.”
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