FabianVoice control of Philips Hue with Alexa has now become a whole lot easier, at least if you use more than one Hue Bridge in your household. After what felt like an eternity, Philips Hue has finally delivered a feature that many of us have been waiting for for years.
“Now you can use Alexa to control multiple bridges in your home”, says the update description for version 5.45.1, which is now available for download in the Apple App Store and will soon be available in the Google Play Store. “To enable this, first go to your smart home settings to relink the skill. All your automations and devices will remain intact after the relink.”
Until now, workarounds were always necessary to use multiple bridges with Alexa
Previously, it was only possible to link one Hue Bridge to one Amazon account. In the past, this led to more or less creative workarounds, such as third-party skills or a detour via Matter. With the update that has now been released, it should work much more easily. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you whether it actually works that easily – I’m not at home at the moment to try out the feature myself. Feel free to write your experiences in the comments.
Apart from that, Philips Hue is delivering some adjustments for the newly released devices with the update. The description states: “Added support for recently launched products like the Hue Play wall washer, the new smart button, and the white versions of the Xamento and Adore recessed spots.” However, these can only be marginal adjustments, as the new devices already worked well with the system before this update. Furthermore, I have not yet discovered any new features in the Philips Hue app.
Any hope this will come to Google Home soon? I tried the matter setup in google home with multiple bridges but it was super unreliable. Ended up digging the smartthings hub back out of the closet and setting it all back up again. I also tried home assistant with the nabu service, but that is has issues as well that ends up not passing the family test. For someone who has invested in hue lights for their entire house, the inability for Hue to come out with an upgraded single bridge to support whole homes or multiple bridge support for these integrations is maddening.
When they added multi bridge support to the app they said this was coming to both Alexa and Google Home. I think they said this year.
What about siri ? and alexa