Philips Hue unveils AI-powered custom lighting and new lights at Berlin showcase

The new tool lets users describe what they want their lights to do and when, and the app handles the rest, according to TechRadar. It is designed to remove the need for manual toggles and timers. It follows two earlier AI efforts. In 2025, Philips Hue introduced an AI assistant that either matched a user-described lighting scene to an existing preset or built a new scene from scratch when no preset fit. Earlier this year, the company launched SpatialAware for the Philips Hue Bridge Pro, which calculates lighting scenes based on the physical positions of smart bulbs, light strips, and lamps in a room. TechRadar reported that the AI for SpatialAware was trained with expertise from professional lighting designers.

Merolla said SpatialAware had been well received. “The adoption of the Bridge Pro was extremely good in terms of adoption,” he said, and that was not surprising because ambience creation is key in smart lighting. He described custom AI behavior as the next step for the category. By analyzing and assessing user and consumer behavior, he said, the system creates “a lot of different layers” from which people can build their own behaviors and automations. “Clearly there is a limit right now, but with the power of large language models, that is not there anymore,” he said.

He was also clear that the AI push is a means to an end. “It's not AI for the sake of it,” he said, but “AI at the service of the consumer experience.” He said the goal is to let users unlock possibilities intuitively rather than to have AI enter people's lives in an intrusive way. Asked which launches excited him most, he grouped custom AI with entertainment accessibility and the new lights.

On entertainment, he said Philips Hue had worked to make lighting for TV and video more accessible. Accessibility includes price: the Sync Box 4K arrived as a more affordable option than the Philips Hue Play Sync Box 8K launched in September 2024. It also includes compatibility: Philips Hue launched Screen Sync, which uses a camera instead of an HDMI input to synchronize Hue lights with a television screen from any source. The company's Bridgeless configuration extends the same idea to the ecosystem—the Sync Box 8K, Sync Box 4K, and Screen Sync can operate without an additional Philips Hue Bridge Zigbee hub. “You can have just one strip light in a Bridgeless configuration,” Merolla said, designed for people who want that benefit without necessarily joining the full ecosystem.

The showcase also brought new hardware. TechRadar characterized some of the additions to the Liane series as particularly stylish. Philips Hue released new Liane 360-degree rope and Signe pole lights. Merolla listed them among the launches that excited him most, describing them as beautiful design objects.