Philips Hue adds Alexa, Siri and Google voice controls for TV-synced lighting effects
Owners of the Philips Hue HDMI Sync Box can now ask their favorite voice assistant to start syncing their smart lights with the colors on their TV screen.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
The Philips Hue HDMI Sync Box is an HDMI switcher for your TV that lets you match your color-changing lights to whatever's playing on your screen in real time.
The Philips Hue HDMI Sync Box, released last year, sits between your TV and anything that you might connect to it -- cable boxes, gaming consoles , streaming sticks, you name it. From there, the box reads the incoming video signals and connects them with Philips Hue's color-changing smart lights. That lets you sync your lights with whatever's on screen for real-time color-matching effects -- and now, you can start and stop the Hue Entertainment light show with a quick voice command to Alexa , Siri or Google Assistant.
You can now turn on effects like these with a quick voice command.
As well as starting and stopping the sync effect, you can ask your voice assistant of choice to change between HDMI inputs, power the Sync Box on and off, or switch between video, audio and gaming modes. Signify, Philips Hue's parent company, also says that you can pair your Sync box with your TV's infrared remote or a Logitech Harmony smart remote to allow for quick control of the system with customizable button presses.
Signify is also announcing new Hue Sync support for Dolby Vision or HDR10 Plus content, a future-proofing move that keeps the highest standard content in play.
The new features are available starting today, Signify says. To enable them, just head to the settings in the Hue Sync app and update your system's software. Pairing the system with a third-party voice assistant requires the Philips Hue Bridge -- though if you already spent $230 on the HDMI Sync Box and likely hundreds more on the lights to go with it, then I'm guessing you've already got that covered.
