Upcoming HomeKit support will let you voice-control your Ikea smart lighting

Furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories giant Ikea announced on Tuesday that its inexpensive TrÃ¥dfri smart lighting system will soon gain support for HomeKit, Apple’s smart home management platform.

German publication iPhone-ticker.de reports that Ikea is readying a software update to its TrÃ¥dfri app to make its smart lighting products controllable not only via Apple’s HomeKit system, but also through Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home smart speakers.

The new firmware update should arrive in the summer.

HomeKit will let you use Siri to voice-control Ikea’s smart bulbs and incorporate HomeKit-enabled Ikea products in your custom scenes through Apple’s Home app on iPhone and iPad.

The official Trådfri app, seen below, allows different family members to easily customize the light and atmosphere however they want, depending on their activity (i.e. choose a light for early mornings, another for late evenings and a third for cooking or working at home).

Announced in March 2017, Ikea’s extensive smart lighting lineup sports plug-and-play simplicity at significantly lower prices than similar systems from the likes of Philips and others.

Starting at $12 a piece, for instance, Ikea’s smart bulbs cost half as much as Philips’ Hue range at $30 per white bulb (goes all the way up to $50 per bulb if you want color). With Ikea’s app, you can dim, turn off, turn on and switch your Ikea smart bulbs from warm to cold light.

The full range of smart lighting systems from Ikea includes LED bulbs, dimming lights, illuminated panels, a motion sensor kit and a gateway device. It was unclear at the time of this writing whether or not Ikea is planning on eventually making its whole range of smart products for the connected home compatible with the HomeKit platform, which would be splendid.