I’ve been trying to add some ‘natural’ feeling Hey Siri phrases to my Hue/HomePod set-up, I’ve had Hue for a couple of months now and have a bit of a default routine that runs most days to offer appropriate brightness/colours for each stage of the day (and mainly the evening).
But life doesn’t always run on schedule and HomePod/Siri Shortcuts is allowing me to easily over-ride a ‘typical day’ and switch to/prolong my preferred scenes at the times when I want to!
I’ve matched some of my favourite scenes to the following (self-explanatory) phrases so that they match the way I/we feel natural speaking to Siri! My favourite is the good old mutter of ‘it’s a bit dark!’
Hey Siri:
I need to focus
I want to read
It’s a bit dark
It’s bathtime (a short period of relaxing light to prepare the mood for the kids bedtime routine!)
“Good Morning” scene turns on lights in living room, kitchen and bedrooms to 90% and a yellow/orange color
“Dinner Time” scene turns lights on in living room and kitchen to 100% and white
“Relax” scene turns lights on in living room and kitchen to 75% and yellow/orange
“Bedtime” scene turns lights in all rooms red and very dim 30-40%
“Good Night” scene turns off all of the lights and connected plugs in the house, unless I want one of the plugs to turn on (e.g. over the summer one of them turned on a fan in the bedroom)
I also have scenes for Christmas (lights turn green and red, tree lights turn on), TV show (we like to watch a particular TV show each week so when the show is about to come on the living room lights change color as a reminder) and sport team lighting based on our favorite teams colors.
We also have “Arrive Home” and “Leave Home” scenes which turn lights on/off automatically depending on who is/isn’t home.