CLEVELAND, Dec. 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- GE is working
to unleash the ultimate living experience through a suite of
connected products designed to make your life simpler and help you
do more. First on that journey is a contemporary LED table lamp
that embeds Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS) directly inside,
allowing you to use a light to order your dinner, listen to the
latest headlines, preheat your oven or give a host of other voice
commands.
The voice controlled light source with microphones and a speaker
is the first announced use of AVS embedded within a lighting
product, bringing the skills you'd find in a traditional Amazon
Echo product without the need for a stand-alone Echo unit, hub or
even a smart phone. Homeowners need only plug in the C by GE lamp
and connect to Alexa to unleash a whole new world of tech
functionality and smart device interoperability throughout the
home.
View a video of the prototype of the lamp in
action, here.
"This integration is so much more than connecting lighting to
voice integration," says Jeff
Patton, General Manager Connected Home Products, GE
Lighting. "It's really about simplifying and extending an
experience for consumers, allowing them to add smart capabilities
throughout the home through a really simple form factor Consumers
don't need a cell phone, a special switch or a hub. They just need
their voice."
The company is incubating a suite of connected products, through
GE Lighting's C by GE brand, and working with ecosystem partners to
create a seamless connected experience that elevates what you can
do at home, helping you free up time, add security, enable broader
control and have fun doing it.
The connected home market is expected to grow threefold over the
next few years, and consumers expect a seamless experience as part
of that process. This introduction springboards that by leveraging
something ubiquitous in the home today—lighting.
"We're excited to work with GE Lighting to bring Alexa to their
LED lamp and enable new types of voice experiences," said
Aaron Brown, Director of Alexa.
"Voice is the future of home automation and the combination of
Alexa with the GE LED table lamp, provides people with a simple and
frictionless way to interact with their homes."
To propel the connected home experience, GE is not only relying
on inventors within its own walls, but drawing inspiration from
companies like Amazon, real-world homeowners it's learning from and
incubating with everyday inventors. The Alexa-enabled GE lamp drew
inspiration from GE Lighting's real-world living labs, whereby the
company tests lighting and connected home features and
functionality with real-world consumers to learn and iterate based
on their feedback.
The concept also was influenced by a recent crowdsourcing
challenge where GE, MAKER MEDIA and Hackster partnered to solicit
makers, from college students to data scientists, to bring LEDs to
life in new and unexpected ways. The winning ideas, which will be
considered as part of future connected lighting designs, included
lighting that notifies you when you are sitting idle for too long
and encourages you to get moving; lighting-based motion detection
that syncs with security services; a lit crib mobile that detects a
baby's heart rate and oxygen levels to protect against SIDS; and
lighting that tracks activity in the home to know who is home and
where they are to customize lighting based on an individual's
preferences and habits.
The Alexa-embedded lamp will be designed in part by Richard
Clarkson, famed designer of The Cloud, a cloud-shaped
ceiling fixture that produces a motion-triggered lightning and
thunder performance.
GE's C by GE table lamp with Alexa will be available for
pre-orders as part of GE's C by GE connected lighting products in
early 2017 on www.CbyGE.com with product availability in the second
quarter of 2017. To learn more about this latest innovation and
sign up for notification when ordering opens, visit
www.CbyGE.com/whatsnext.
About CbyGE
GE's C by GE brand unleashes the ultimate
living experience through a suite of connected products that enable
homeowners to do more and be better. Part of the GE Lighting
portfolio, C by GE products build on the company's century of
innovation, invention and imagination at work. Our deep
understanding of the home and our expertise in the connectivity of
things results in simple, connected designs to help people
thrive.
About GE
GE (NYSE: GE) is the world's Digital
Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined
machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and
predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge,
the "GE Store," through which each business shares and accesses the
same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention
further fuels innovation and application across our industrial
sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers
better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry.
www.ge.com
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SOURCE GE Lighting