Yes, but what happens when you have one room with multiple light fixtures, each with multiple bulbs, and you want to manage them separately? This is relevant to me because I have a very long attic loft bedroom. If my wife is in bed at one end of the room and I’m on the computer at the other end, I want the lights at dim at my end and off at hers.
There are workarounds involving “automations” or tricks with naming conventions but they’re very tedious and spotty. The ability to group bulbs together (which Phillips Hue offers) would be much cleaner.
But then “turn on the lights” doesn’t work. I’ve only got 1 speaker in the room. This would also fail if you had IoT lights in your nightstands and you wanted to control just the main (multi-light-fixture) light but not the nightstand lights, for example, which is specifically why I don’t bother with IoT lights in nightstands and the like.
The Alexa home app allows you to have groups of groups, so you can divide the room into separate groups, then combine them into one room group. This is what Google should be doing, pretty bad that Amazon of all people does this part of smart home management better when it’s a relatively simple thing to do.
However you should be using automation from timers and sensors to turn lights on and off, the app or voice should only be needed on rare occasions. This is also something Google is shit at, I use home assistant to manage this (I have about 200 smart devices) but there are plenty of other options.
The solution is to name every light in the multi light fixture with the same name. For example I have an arc lamp with 3 bulbs all named “arc lamp” saying “hey Google arc lamp on” turns all 3 on.
Yes, but what happens when you have one room with multiple light fixtures, each with multiple bulbs, and you want to manage them separately? This is relevant to me because I have a very long attic loft bedroom. If my wife is in bed at one end of the room and I’m on the computer at the other end, I want the lights at dim at my end and off at hers.
There are workarounds involving “automations” or tricks with naming conventions but they’re very tedious and spotty. The ability to group bulbs together (which Phillips Hue offers) would be much cleaner.
You create a group in favourite and for lights you can add multiple lights to it. https://9to5google.com/2023/06/23/google-home-favorites-light-groups/
Couldn’t you just make them into two rooms in the app? One for each side?
But then “turn on the lights” doesn’t work. I’ve only got 1 speaker in the room. This would also fail if you had IoT lights in your nightstands and you wanted to control just the main (multi-light-fixture) light but not the nightstand lights, for example, which is specifically why I don’t bother with IoT lights in nightstands and the like.
The Alexa home app allows you to have groups of groups, so you can divide the room into separate groups, then combine them into one room group. This is what Google should be doing, pretty bad that Amazon of all people does this part of smart home management better when it’s a relatively simple thing to do.
However you should be using automation from timers and sensors to turn lights on and off, the app or voice should only be needed on rare occasions. This is also something Google is shit at, I use home assistant to manage this (I have about 200 smart devices) but there are plenty of other options.
Oh gotcha
The solution is to name every light in the multi light fixture with the same name. For example I have an arc lamp with 3 bulbs all named “arc lamp” saying “hey Google arc lamp on” turns all 3 on.