What is the easiest way to control with bunch of smart bulbs installed in a building?

Question

My requirement is to install a set of smart bulbs in each room in an office building. "Neither remote control or motion sensors are options". That means either I have to use voice control or voice and gesture control together.

Google Home, Amazon Echo or Apple HomeKit are the three options that came into my mind when I first think about this requirement. Yet, that is not going to be a feasible option as there are multiple rooms in the building and different people visit these rooms every day. Therefore, calling a bulb by its given label is not a feasible option.

I would like to know any existing solutions or ideas to address this.

I would like to know what sort of an IoT system would help me to address this problem? Are there any bulbs which have built-in capability to react to voice commands (This will still not solve the issue but this is for my information)?

Answer 1

Both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa allow you to create "rooms" and add both devices and smart speakers to those rooms.

Once you do this the systems will infer the room name when you talk to the smart speaker in that room so if you say:

"OK Google, turn on the lights"

It will turn the lights on in the current room.

This does mean buying something like a Google Home Mini or an Echo Dot for each room you want to control.

Answer 2

Why not use a mobile app. When the user logs into his account, he must see only his room and connected devices which he can then interact with. The connectivity could be established through internet or if you want it to be more local may be through blue-tooth/ zigbee/zwave etc. In addition, if you don't want any user login and authentication and want to give access to the people present in the room you could use beacons to identify which room it is and then display the related devices. Hope it helps.