Philips Hue lights now respond to plain English commands via AI-powered automation

Philips Hue has introduced Custom AI Behaviors, a fresh approach to smart home automation that lets users command their lighting systems using ordinary English rather than navigating complicated interface menus. The capability enables far more sophisticated control sequences than the app's traditional scene and color-switching tools previously allowed.

What's changing#

The new feature, announced at this week's IFA trade show, harnesses an AI assistant embedded in the Hue app to interpret natural language requests and build automations around them. Rather than manually configuring multiple settings across different screens, users can simply describe what they want—for instance, "turn on my lights at a nightlight level when I'm asleep, but use normal color temperature when awake." The system handles the underlying logic once it receives a trigger signal (like pressing a button to indicate sleep mode).

The same technology extends to programming Hue's physical switches and buttons, which traditionally require tedious step-by-step configuration. A demonstrated scenario showed how users could ask the system to disable a motion sensor via a specific button press—solving real-world frustrations like lights constantly flickering on when a pet moves around.

How it works#

Custom AI Behaviors runs locally on Hue's Bridge Pro device for speed and reliability, while the language processing happens in the cloud. The technical approach uses a domain-specific programming language designed specifically to work with the AI assistant, built on the open-weight GLM family of models. Philips opted for open-source models rather than proprietary ones to maintain control over how the system behaves over time, since closed-source models can shift their capabilities without warning.

The underlying automation engine will be available for third-party developers to build with, expanding possibilities beyond Philips' own offerings.

New Sonos integration#

Alongside Custom AI Behaviors, Philips has integrated select Hue switches with Sonos speakers. Users can now employ devices like the Hue Tap Dial Switch to control playback—triggering favorites, pausing or playing audio, adjusting volume, and skipping between tracks. This update arrives in November via a software update.

Why this matters#

George Yianni, Philips Hue's head of technology, explained that many power users already create elaborate automations, but they typically do so outside the Hue app because the interface was simply too restrictive. The UI complexity needed to expose all available controls—light colors, sensor readings, button presses, and timing data—made a traditional design impractical. "This is not AI for the sake of AI; it's a practical application of the technology," Yianni noted, describing how language models solve this design problem by offering an intuitive entry point to the system's full capability.