LIFX Color 1000 BR30 Smart Bulb Review – Ecosystems and Summary

Before the summary of the LIFX Color 1000 BR30 smart Wifi flood light’s review, let’s take a more detailed look at a couple of the eco-systems that the LIFX lights work with.

I’ve already mentioned that the just announced support for Apple HomeKit – and Siri – their voice controlled personal assistant, will not require a bridge.  No real surprise there.

As to what level of control Siri will be able to do with voice, expect only basic controls.  As is normal for voice based personal assistants, including Siri, Echo’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana… don’t expect to be able to do very much setup, or anything really fancy by voice, unless you create the fancy capabilities you want first, using the LIFX app.

Voice control – using personal assistants:

As a general rule of thumb, for lighting control by voice , expect to be able to turn a light, or a group (scene, whatever its called), on and off, and most likely control of brightness.  Changing color is definitely possible, but with millions of colors to choose, don’t expect the same ability as the app.  Perhaps primary and secondary colors.

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A really capable app will let you select those scenes you have pre-defined.  For example, you might be able to create a scene called Sunset Dark Teal.  Telling Alexa, Siri, etc, to run Sunset Dark (should they accept this level of control), would bring up that lighting – with the defined brightness and color shade.  You might even have a different Scene called Sunset Dark Red – a variation with the preselected color some shade of red (or red orange, or…) that you like.

With the current level of voice recognition, don’t expect to rattle off something like Set the Living room Lights to 35%, with a mix that 55% Blue, 33% Green, 12% Red.  Someday, perhaps as the “contextual AI gets better.

OK, Obviously we don’t know exactly the language that Siri will recognize, so don’t know the capabilities.

With Amazon Echo using Alexa, there are two levels of controls.  Basic gives you On/Off, and Brightness – Color will be the same color that was last on.  But add LIFX Skills, and you can now also control the basic color.

Alexa voice controlling the LIFX lights:

• Alexa, Turn the lights on
• Alexa, Turn the Kitchen light off
• Alexa, Switch lights to 50% brightness
• Alexa, lower brightness by 25%
• Alexa, dim Bedroom lights by 25%

To change colors or control your LIFX groups just add “tell Life-Ex…

• Alexa, tell `Life-Ex` to make my lights blue
• Alexa, tell `Life-Ex` to change the Living Room lights to red

As I mentioned there are (free) LIFX Skills:  Enable the advanced LIFX Skill, under Skills in the Alexa app, to control LIFX colors and groups (there are two, it’s the second one – that will allow color adjustment. Once activated, say “Alexa, ask ‘Life-Ex’: what I can do with my lights?” and Alexa will provide control options for the skill.  Over time, it may well be that you won’t need LIFX Skills, as primary support adds more of the “advanced” capabilities.

Most of the allowed functionality with Alexa voice control works great, but I’m still struggling getting it to change colors.  With the Skill it works, sometimes (it needs to be a group).  Mildly annoying, but it seems to be an issue only with Alexa’s recognition.  The same profile name it acknowledges and works with, for off/on, and brightness, it tells me it doesn’t recognize when I’m giving it a color command, and so on.  I’ll get it sorted out, but I understand why Alexa’s LIFX skill gets a 2 star rating, Amazon needs to invest more effort to get this one working smoothly.  That’s OK, considering that this Alexa issue is my biggest overall complaint with the LIFX, and I’ve got LIFX and SmartThings both changing the lights colors rather effortlessly.