TechRadar Smart Home Week
This article is part of TechRadar’s Smart Home Week 2025. From lighting and switches to robot vacuums and smart thermostats, we’re here to help you pick the right devices to make your life easier, and get the most out of them.
Leveling up your lighting is one of the easiest ways to start building a smart home, and it can have a lot of benefits. For instance, you can control smart lights hands-free using voice commands, or set them to turn on and off when you’re away on vacation and so deter thieves.
That’s only scratching the surface of what they’re capable of, though, so we spoke to Giuliano Ghidini, Business and Marketing leader at Signify, to find out more about the benefits of installing smart lights at home, and where the tech is going next.
Signify is the parent company of Philips Hue and WiZ, which are the brands behind many of the best smart lights we’ve tested here at TechRadar. Hue is the one that comes to mind when most people think of smart lights, while Wiz is a more budget-friendly option.
“Hue stretches across indoor and outdoor, and has different variants of products in all those categories,” says Ghidini. “Hue offers a more comprehensive range so you can cover all rooms, and thanks to the technology it’s based on, Zigbee, with a Hue hub you have very good coverage indoor and outdoor, and very high reliability without putting too much stress on your Wi-Fi network.”
Wiz came later, and is a more affordable brand with a smaller range of lights, which connect directly to Wi-Fi.
“We wanted to bring high quality at a more affordable price point. It allows us to finally bring smart lighting to more houses in the UK and the world,” says Ghidini.
Why smart lighting?
Ghidini says a lot has happened in the seven years since he joined Signify, with smart lighting shifting from something seen as very technical to products you’ll find in ordinary department stores.
Once sold exclusively by retailers specializing in computer hardware, Hue has now gone mainstream and even has a dedicated space in the flagship John Lewis shop on London’s Oxford Street.
It’s very important to talk about smart lighting knowing it’s not only the light bulb
Giuliano Ghidini
“So first of all, it’s very important to talk about smart lighting knowing it’s not only the light bulb,” he says. “For some people it’s still a connected bulb, but when you look at Philips Hue and Wiz, we have products in all categories, both indoor and outdoor, and we have other products as well.
“So when you talk about convenience, you can talk about how we use lighting for security, outdoors and indoors. For example, you can have lights flashing red if there is an intruder or motion is detected where you don’t expect it.
“You can set scenes depending on the time of the day to change the mood for a party, for instance. And lighting can sync with music, or for wellness. For example, you can wake up with the right light and that helps you to have a more relaxed and better start of the day. You can use it for entertainment, integrate the lighting that you have in the living room with what happens on your TV.
“It all started with just a connected light bulb, and what you can do now is quite amazing.”
What’s next
So what’s coming up next in the world of smart lighting? Ghidini isn’t giving anything away just yet, but it sounds like convenience is going to play a big role.
“Smart lighting is basically connected lighting,” he says. “With that connectivity, you can do many things – connect your lighting to other smart home systems to make your home more secure, for instance. You can connect to a specific scene to help your general wellness, or in order to improve the ambience of your living room, bedroom, and kitchen – all the different rooms in your house.”
It’s not just about the technology, though – smart lighting is also about making your life easier, and there are exciting developments afoot on this front.
“The integration of these products with other platforms is very important – for example, Google, or Amazon Alexa. Then you have access to an extended number of use cases as well, where you control lighting not only with your phone but also with your voice. In some cases the control is done on your behalf because you have intelligent systems. We just launched an AI system that will do it for you.”
Ghidini isn’t giving anything else away for now, but promises something exciting is coming soon. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we know more.
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