After developer Brandon Evans purchased a set of Phillips HUE lights, he was quite disappointed that they weren’t supported by Siri. However, he didn’t let that stop him from living in the future as he hacked an existing Siri proxy using Ruby. With this, Evans was able to hack the HUE API into his proxy, allowing him to control his lights via voice. Evans said the following on the hack:
“The first thing that I wanted to do with the Hue bulbs is get them working with Siri. I had seen last year someone created SiriProxy (in Ruby, luckily for me), and that it should allow me to do this. I’m actually using the The-Three-Little-Pigs fork as it has active developers, although I’ll continue to just call it SiriProxy. The other part of making this work was the Hue API. Philips has said that they want to release an SDK at some point, however quite a fewpeople have sniffed the API already and gained almost full control of the system.”
Since this hack is fairly involved, we wouldn’t recommend that the faint of heart try it. Either way, Evans has posted all code and instructions needed to use HUE with Siri on Github. He also posted a video showing how it all works to Vimeo. Some of the commands are pretty cool; for instance, you can use Siri to control the intensity of the lights as well as the color the bulbs put out.
If you’re unaware, Phillips introduced the HUE lights earlier this year. HUE lights can be controlled via an iPhone app, which is available for free. Phillips may be releasing a HUE SDK in the future, which would make it easier for developers to make HUE-centric applications. If you want a set of HUE lights for yourself, expect to drop a pretty $199 on the starter pack.