There are a few truisms in smart home product development:
- The most elegantly engineered smart home products disappear into the background.
- Consumers don’t want complexity — make the user experience easy, easy, easy.
- The best user interface is no user interface.
The recent partnership between smart lighting manufacturer Orro and Alarm.com takes these truisms to heart. Orro offers a well-designed smart light switch that integrates light, motion, and audio sensors to deliver adaptive lighting, which the company terms “human-centric lighting on auto-pilot.” Thanks to AI, the switch learns from users’ manual preferences and automatically adjusts to provide optimal lighting conditions throughout the day. Integrated voice control with built-in Alexa further extends the switch’s touch-free capability. The audio features also enable the switch to serve as an intercom with rooms throughout the home.
While Alarm.com has long integrated with a variety of smart lighting products from Leviton, Eaton, iDevices, and GE by Jasco, Orro offers a set of features that may excite security subscribers, especially when they can easily integrate their lighting with the scenes and automation achieved through their smart security app.
Interpret’s Smart Home MatrixTM research finds that voice control (27%) is the most popular user interface for smart light bulb owners, closely followed by using the manufacturer’s app (26%). Few smart lighting systems to date have offered the level of automated intelligence offered by Orro, as indicated by the 8% of those whose primary control method is “automatically triggered.” While few prefer to use a security system app as their primary control of smart lighting on a daily basis, once a system like Orro is integrated with a security system, the user can freely use voice without needing to access the app or a separate smart speaker. Though system owners rarely use voice to control a smart security system, the integration provides the flexibility for users to use a variety of means of home control to suit any situation.
“We have long recognized the opportunity for security dealers to generate more incremental revenue with smart lighting, though the share of lighting products sales in the security channel remains relatively small,” said Interpret Vice President Brad Russell. “Integration with smartly engineered products like Orro provides a distinctive offering that has the potential to open up whole new uses cases to be addressed by security dealers.”
Learn more about consumer preferences and purchasing behavior around smart lighting and many other smart home products by exploring Interpret’s Smart Home Matrix line of research.
