• by Chase Martin , August 17, 2016

Smart homes continue to become simplified with voice controlled lighting.

Ledvance, the company behind Osram and Sylvania, just teamed up with Amazon’s Alexa AI to bring voice control to smart lights in the home.

Consumers can now connect their smart lights, which are typically controlled via smartphone, to any Amazon Alexa-powered device in their home.

In conjunction with Amazon’s Echo, the Osram Lightify Gateway will enable a consumer to simply say they want to dim certain lights in their home and the work will be automated for them.

“Voice enables incredibly simple and magical experiences,” said Charlie Kindel, director of Alexa Smart Home.

“Imagine being able to walk in your front door and have your house listen for your request to turn on the lights; now that’s a reality.”

The smart lights operate using the ZigBee home automation standard to connect, so they work with other home automation ecosystems.

At the core of this collaborative effort is an overall push for smart home accessibility, according to Aaron Ganick, head of smart home in the Americas at Ledvance.

“Living in a Smart Home should not require an advanced technology degree,” Ganick said. “In order to bring the benefits of a smart home to the mass market, we need to simplify how consumers interact with our products.”

Simplifying the smart home user experience seems to be a common goal within the industry.

For example, Logitech recently created its Pop Home Switch, which aims to take the smartphone out of the equation of connected devices in the home.

The Pop switch is a large physical button that consumers can set to perform up to three unique functions, based around the connected devices within their homes.

The power behind that system is that it aggregates the control of various smart home ecosystems, including Samsung’s SmartThings, Belkin’s WeMo and other smart lights from Philips.