Philips Hue and Spotify partner to let lights sync with your music - The Verge

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If you’ve got a home full of Hue lights, there’s an easy new way to set the mood for your next party. Signify, which makes the Philips Hue line, is partnering with Spotify so that your lightbulbs can automatically sync up with whatever music you have playing, changing color and flashing along to the beat.

There are already plenty of ways to sync your lights to music — including Signify’s own Hue Sync app — but those methods typically require letting an app or some external hardware listen in on everything you’re playing. This new partnership avoids that by letting the Hue Bridge tap directly into Spotify to see what’s playing once you’ve linked your accounts.

That close partnership is also supposed to provide a better experience, letting the Hue system adjust lighting effects based on specific data about the music you’re playing, including its genre, tempo, volume, mood, and more. You can also go into the app and customize the effects if you don’t want the system deciding how to light things on its own.

The system comes with a couple of catches: to use it, you’ll need a Hue Bridge, which not every Hue owner is going to have (newer bulbs can be used over Bluetooth without the dedicated hub); and the feature only supports color bulbs. On the other hand, you don’t need a paid Spotify subscription — free accounts will work just fine.

Signify says the feature will start rolling out today and be available to all Hue users within a week. It’s initially being billed as an “early access” feature; in October, it’s supposed to get more prominent billing as a “permanent part” of the Hue app.

In addition to the Spotify partnership, Signify announced a whole bunch of new Hue lights today, including more filament lights, brighter bulb configurations, and updated lamps.

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Amazon’s new ‘adaptive volume’ will make Alexa speak louder when it’s noisy - The Verge

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Amazon is working to solve a frustration with smart home speakers by introducing a feature called Adaptive Volume, which will make Alexa respond louder if it detects that you’re in a noisy environment. According to the company, the mode is meant to make sure that you can still hear Alexa’s responses over any background noise (like the sound of a dishwasher, people talking, or music playing on another device). Amazon says that the feature is currently available to US customers, and that you can activate it by saying “Alexa, turn on adaptive volume.”

Amazon doesn’t mention adaptive volume working in the opposite direction, becoming quieter if there’s no background noise, but there are other ways to reduce the volume dynamically. One of them is Whisper Mode, where Alexa will whisper its response if you talk to it quietly. As this relaxing video points out, you can activate the mode by asking Alexa to “turn on whisper mode.”

If you’re instead looking to just adjust the volume depending on what time it is, Alexa enthusiasts recommend doing so by adding a “set volume” action to a custom routine that activates at a certain time, or making it part of your bedtime routine.

We just gave Adaptive Volume a quick test with an Echo Dot sitting next to a desktop PC with a spinning fan, and it seems a little bit inconsistent; some of Alexa’s responses were louder than usual, but others went back to the original volume.

It’s worth noting that the Adaptive Volume feature isn’t the same as the spherical Echo fourth gen’s adaptive sound, which uses the device’s microphones to tune music to sound better in your specific room. This also isn’t the first time we’ve seen a smart assistant try to adapt its volume to the user’s environment — Google Nest’s Ambient IQ promises to do something similar for spoken word content or assistant responses.

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