Alexa Blogs
We are very happy to announce tunable lighting control, a feature in the Smart Home Skill API, is now available in the UK, with support for Germany coming soon.
With tunable lighting control you can set the scene for your mood or change the look and feel of your environment, by choosing from an array of RGB colours. Why not say “Alexa, set the living room light to green” while you watch your favourite sports team, or “Alexa, turn the kitchen yellow” to match the omelette you’re cooking? 
But what’s more, you can also choose from five shades of white, which are perfect for different times of day. “Alexa, set the bedroom light to daylight” after you wake up, or perhaps “Alexa, change the living room to cool white” while you’re working on a paper?
You can even set your white lights to “incandescent”, re-creating the style and environment created by traditional incandescent bulbs.
These features are supported with lights from Hive, Hue, LIFX, and bulbs connected through SmartThings.
The controls allow methods for:
- Setting colours by name (“red”, “blue”, “fuschia” and many more, with hue and saturation levels as defined in the HSB model)
- Setting the temperature of white light by name (“warm”, “cool”, “soft”, “daylight”) which map to defined levels in degrees Kelvin
- Increase / decrease the temperature of white light from the current Kelvin value
If a customer says something like “Alexa, set the table lamp to reading”, a Kelvin value of 2,700 is sent to the colorTemperature object. “Alexa, change the kitchen light to daylight” would send a temperature of 5,500. The values of these phrase-based temperature settings can be found in the SetColorTemperatureRequest section of our API reference documentation.
Please review our documentation on color and white lighting control for more technical details. To learn more about developing a smart home skill check out these resources:
