Forget TVs and game consoles, innovative smart home tech is the hit of this year’s CES – and we may have finally seen a new smart lighting solution to rival Philips Hue’s range of market-leading bulbs.
The best smart lights allow you to instantly change the atmosphere in your home with the touch of a smartphone, a Philips Hue Color Ambiance is our top choice of available smart lights from 2021. Now, however, Nanoleaf has upped its smart home game by unveiling an impressively intelligent lighting system – dubbed the Sense + Control family – in CES 2023.
Consisting of three products – Sense+ Smart Light Switch, Sense+ Wireless Light Switch and Nala Learning Bridge – the latest Nanoleaf series eliminates the need to manually schedule smart lights. Instead, the company says its new setup is able to learn your routines to automatically adjust the brightness and color of the lights already in your home.
“Over time, users will be able to use smart lighting in their home in a truly smart and hands-free way,” Nanoleaf said at CES, explaining that Nala is referring to the new Automation Learning Assistant (NALA, got it?) future will also be in existing Nanoleaf Thread Border Routers.
All three devices in the new Nanoleaf Sense+ Control line – which is expected to appear in the second half of 2023 – are Material and thread-enabled, meaning you’ll be able to easily connect them to your other compatible smart home gadgets.
At CES, Nanoleaf confirmed its intention to bring Shapes, Elements, Canvas, and Lines lights to Matter later this year. They were third on our list best smart lights money can buy, so we expect Nanoleaf old and new products to reorder our list in the coming months.
At least on paper, the new Nanoleaf Sense + Control setup seems to be smarter than even the best Philips Hue control models. Products available from the latter brand ask you to manually select the times and days you want to auto-brightness, while Nanoleaf says its Sense+ family will learn to do the same footwork “over time”.
Of course, we’ll have to test that claim ourselves when we get our hands on Nanoleaf’s latest smart lighting solution later this year. It’s also worth noting that Nanoleaf products typically don’t offer the same level of brightness and intensity as their Philips Hue counterparts, despite sharing the same color spectrum. So while the Nanoleaf Sense+ family doesn’t include light bulbs, the jury is still out on how good its automation will actually turn out to be.
Check out ours CES 2023 the center of all the latest news from the program up to date. We’ll cover everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home gadgets, so stick with the big stories with us.