How to connect Philips Hue lights with Apple HomeKit and Siri

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

One of the most useful features of a smart home is controlling smart lighting. It's a great experience to turn off the lights from the comfort of your bed or the couch without having to get up. It's easy to use Apple's HomeKit smart home platform to connect your smart light bulbs to your phone.

You can use this set up to connect your smart lighting to other connected devices. This allows you to create automations that do things like have your lights turn on and your music start playing in the morning when a motion sensor is triggered or set a Movie Time scene that adjusts your lights.

Apple's adaptive lighting is one of the benefits of connecting Apple HomeKit. The color temperature of your lights can be adjusted by this feature. They are set to a cooler white light during the daytime to help you focus and a warmer light as the day goes on to help your body clock adjust to nighttime.

How to connect your lights to HomeKit.

Image: Philips Hue

Set up Philips Hue smart lights in the Apple Home app

If you want to use Apple HomeKit to control your smart lighting device with your voice, you will need a bridge and an Apple HomeKit device. You will need an Apple Home Hub to set up automations.

• Open the Philips Hue app on your iPhone or iPad.
• Go to Settings > Voice Assistant > Siri & HomeKit.
• Tap Pair Bridge.
• Name your home and tap Create home.
• Scan the HomeKit code on the bottom of your Hue Bridge with your phone’s camera.
• Follow the prompts to connect your Hue lights.
• The Hue app and the Apple Home app should sync your rooms, so any lights you have in rooms in the Hue app will appear in corresponding rooms in the Home app.
• If this doesn’t happen, tap the Settings button at the bottom of the Siri & HomeKit page in the Hue app and select Sync setup to HomeKit.

Once set up, you can use voice commands to turn your lights on or off. The lights can be added to any HomeKit Scenes and Automations.

Set up Hue Accessories in the Apple Home app

If you have a physical control device for your bulbs, such as a smart dimmer switch, you can pair it with HomeKit. You won't be able to control them in the Hue app once you set them up in the Apple Home app.

If you have other smart lights in your home that are HomeKit compatible, you should add these to the Apple Home app. You can use the Apple Home app to control the lights with the accessory switches.

Adding your accessory switches to the Apple Home app is easy.

• Open the Philips Hue app.
• Tap Settings > Accessories and select the device you want to add to Apple Home.
• Tap Setup in Apple Home.
• A dialogue box will pop up confirming that setting up the device in Apple Home will remove your current configuration.
• Tap Set up in Apple Home.
• The Hue app will automatically open the Apple Home app.
• Tap the device’s icon in the Home App.
• Configure it to control whichever HomeKit accessories you like.
• If you decide you want to go back to using just the Hue app, you can reset the device and set it up again in the Hue app.