How can you turn on your lights with your voice?

The best thing about my house is that if I get into my warm bed late at night and then remember I forgot to turn the bathroom light off… Instead of having to venture out of my warm cocoon I can turn off my lights without moving a muscle.

How? Because all of the lights in my house are smart—meaning that all I need to do is say “Hey Siri, turn off all the lights”, and as if by magic, the house goes dark.

And it’s easier to get started than you might think.

There are essentially two pieces of the puzzle that you need to solve: first, you need to invest in some smart bulbs or smart lights, and then you need to figure out how to control them with your voice.

There are countless smart lighting brands out there at the moment, but my advice would be to go with lights or bulbs from one of the big, mainstream names, like Philips Hue, LIFX, Govee or TP-Link Kasa. All four brands offer a range of products, from standard bulbs through to standing lamps and even garden lights.

Or another option is to employ the use of smart plugs, to transform your existing "dumb" lights into something a little smarter. This is essentially a small block that sits between your lamp’s power cord and the wall, and simulates the switching on and off of the power button.

There are cheaper options available, but the reason to go with a name you can trust is that not only will you get better support and compatibility with other smart devices in your home, but it’s better for security too. If you use a name you can trust, there’s less risk that the bulb in your ceiling will be hoovering up your wifi data and sending it to who-knows-where.

In my case, my house is kitted out with Philips Hue, which are on the pricier end of the spectrum—but I can personally vouch for their reliability over a number of years now.

Though they do have one drawback, which is something important to look for. Hue, like some other brands (such as Ikea), won’t just work over wifi. Instead, they require an extra control hub, which plugs into my wifi router.

This is because Hue and Ikea bulbs use a different wireless technology called Zigbee to communicate with each other.

In any case, it’s an easy problem to get around, as typically brands will sell "starter" kits that come with a hub and a couple of bulbs in the same package.

Once everything is plugged in, it should simply be a case of installing the smart bulb manufacturer’s app on your phone, and it’ll guide you through the setup to control your lights with their own-brand app.

And this brings us on to the second stage, because nobody really wants to have to use an app every time they want to turn on their lights. We want to use our voices.

So next you’ll need to pick a smart-home platform to act as an intermediary. Typically if you’re an Apple user this could be the Home app, if you’re an Android user it could be Google’s own Home app—or if you want to use an Amazon Alexa smart speaker, then you’ll want to fire up the Alexa app.

The good news is that most of the time, it is pretty straightforward from here: Once you go into the relevant smart-home app, there’s a chance it may detect your bulbs automatically, and magically configure them for you. If not, check out the bulb manufacturer’s app’s settings section, where you will probably see a button to hook up the bulb to, for example, Apple or Google.

And then once everything is connected, you’ll never have to get out of bed to turn off the lights again.