Ketra, for those of you who do not know, is one of the more popular LED lighting manufacturers out there, and the company has just announced that its products will soon support both Amazon Alexa and Google Home. To be more specific, the company just announced integration with Amazon Alexa, while integration with Google Home is coming next month, in February, based on the company’s press release.
This company is considered to be a manufacturer of LED lighting for workplaces, hospitality spaces, and so on, in other words, architectural-grade lighting systems are being made by Ketra, so it’s possible that some of you haven’t heard of the company just yet. The company has also mentioned that homeowners who already use the Ketra lighting system will be required to download the 1.14.1 firmware update for their N4 Hubs if they’d like to take advantage of Amazon Alexa and Google Home integration, as it won’t work without it. It’s also worth saying that Ketra is mostly US-focused, which is why those of you outside of US are probably not familiar with the company’s products. Ketra believes that Amazon Alexa and Google Home integration will help it expand more into the residential market, that its product will reach more homes in the near future, as the growth of Amazon Alexa and Google Home-supported products is undeniable at this point.
The Google Home is an Amazon Assistant-powered speaker which was announced quite some time ago, while Google did introduce the Google Home Mini as well during its press conference last year. The Google Home Mini is basically a cheaper version of the Google Home, and it is inferior to its big brother, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper. There are a ton of Google Assistant-supported devices out there, which essentially means that you’ll be able to control Ketra’s lighting system using any of them, in the end. Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is also supported by quite a few devices, and during this year’s CES, which ended not long ago, we’ve seen a number of announcement similar to the one Ketra released, as more and more OEMs are integrating their IoT products with both Google’s and Amazon’s platforms.