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Illuminate Every Space Just Right

Lutron offers light products for any space or budget—from single-room apartments to palatial estates. Start small in a few rooms or incorporate smart lighting control everywhere in the home. Wired and wireless dimmers, switches, and custom-configurable keypads replace your standard light switches to make managing your lighting in one, multiple, or all rooms as easy as pressing a button.

Lutron systems grow with you, too. If you begin by adding smart lighting capability to the kitchen and bedrooms but decide to expand to the home theater and patio later, you can! Lutron control systems can support one to 10,000 integrated devices, depending on the system that’s right for you.

Lutron lighting isn’t just smart; it’s beautiful and nourishing. Experience tunable LED lighting that shifts color temperature and intensity throughout the day to bring the benefits of natural light inside your Park City, UT home. Play with a near-infinite palette of light colors to set the mood and elevate your home décor.

SEE ALSO: These Smart Lighting Innovations Can Transform Your Home

Dress Your Interiors with Elegant Shades and Controls

At the touch of a button or through personalized schedules, Lutron motorized window treatments quietly and uniformly fill your home with energizing sunlight by day, then promptly give you privacy when you need it. Choose from various styles and fabrics to coordinate with your unique interior design.

Command Naturally

As we mentioned in the previous blog, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant require a certain order to commands and getting device names right. While they both have made strides in that area, even your four-year-old can process language better (they may not do your bidding, but we won’t go into that here). Josh.ai, on the other hand, has a handle on both the context of your commands and where you want to get something done. When you are in the living room and say, “lower the shades in 3 minutes,” it knows what room you are in and which motorized shades you mean.

Like your personal butler (which you won’t need anymore with Josh.ai), Josh can understand more than one thing at a time. And unlike your four-year-old, it will faithfully do what is asked. A compound directive like “dim the lights to 20%, turn the temperature to 73, and start Firefly Lane on Netflix” will be understood and executed without a puzzled look or a quizzical reply. This is voice control the way it should be.

SEE ALSO: Optimize Your Smart Home System with Remote Access

An App When You Want it

Sometimes it’s easier to manage something at the tap of a screen rather than by voice. Josh.ai has an elegant, intuitive companion app that lets you customize your smart home experience. Organized by rooms, it's easy to manage devices and functions in a room, and you can manage multiple properties too. A powerful personalization feature is profiles, where you can control how guests, kids, and visitors can manage specific parts of your smart home. Of course, Josh also integrates seamlessly with automation systems like Control4, so you can combine all your smart home functionality under one comprehensive control system. 

A Higher Intelligence – with Privacy

Josh.ai was designed as a voice control platform for home automation and not for other reasons. The company behind it does not gather information that can be used for marketing purposes. A unique feature of Josh is superior processing power built into the hardware that processes commands locally versus sending it to the cloud, creating a more secure and private approach to voice control. That power also lets Josh.ai learn your habits and do routine things for you, like lowering your shades on late afternoons in Bountiful, UT, to keep the sun's glare out – and that information stays in your home.

Smart Home Integration

Amazon Echo and Google Home aren’t just smart speakers; they’re smart home platforms that connect your devices so you can control everything with your voice or through their respective mobile apps. Amazon’s and Google’s voice control assistants also integrate with home automation systems like Control4 to bring the convenience of voice control to more complex smart homes.

It’s hard to find a smart home device that doesn’t integrate with Alexa or Google Assistant. Both platforms work with tens of thousands of devices that span every category: lights, locks, thermostats, video doorbells, refrigerators… you name it. And they’re adding new products all the time.

Like we mentioned, Alexa and Google Assistant work with other smart home devices and systems as well. For example, use Amazon Echo or Google Home speakers to command your Lutron lighting and shading control system, your Sonos multiroom speaker system, Nest and ecobee devices, and more.

SEE ALSO: 4 Convenient Ways to Control Your Smart Lighting System

Ease of Use

When it comes to controlling your Park City, UT smart home by voice, the more natural the commands, the better. While Alexa and Google Assistant require specific and often repetitive syntax when activating devices, Google Assistant seems to edge out Alexa in ease of use.

The Rise of Voice Control

Voice control for the smart home skyrocketed after Amazon released its first-generation Echo smart speaker in 2014. Two years later, Google followed suit with its release of the Google Home smart speaker, as did Josh.ai with its (albeit higher-end) Josh Micro smart speaker. Of the biggest players in voice control, Apple trailed in last with its HomePod smart speaker in 2018.

Out of the gate, smart speakers could do a lot. Looking specifically at DIY smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, they could stream music, set alarms and reminders, answer trivial questions, and more. It didn’t take long for manufacturers to build solutions that would also enable these speakers to be used for sending voice commands to smart home devices.

Voice Control + Home Automation

Control4, a leader in home automation systems, noticed the rising popularity of using voice commands to control smart home devices and officially announced its integration with Amazon Alexa in 2016. Today, Control4 smart homes integrate with all the big players in voice assistant technology!

Something magical happens when you pair voice control with a home automation system like Control4. Not only can you control individual devices in your Park City, UT home, like a door lock or TV, but you can also control multiple devices at once using a single verbal command.

For example, when you get home from work, tell your smart speaker to activate your Evening scene. In seconds, the lights change, the shades lower, the temperature adjusts, and your favorite music plays overhead. Control4 paired with voice control lets you enjoy the power of automation—hands-free.

Acoustic Panel Placement

The first element in acoustic treatment is taming reflections. The goal is to subdue reflections, absorbing just enough reverberation so that the sound is natural and presents precisely what the artist and sound engineer intended. Acoustic panels come in different noise reduction ratings, called NRC (Noise Reduction Coefficient). A panel with an NRC rating of .50 means that it absorbs 50% of the sound waves that hit it and reflects the other 50% back into the room.

Acoustic panels should be used at the reflection points of your speakers. For front stage speakers, depending on how they’re aimed, these points could be on parts of the back and side walls. In non-rectangular rooms, other walls may be reflection points, too. Some reflectivity will depend on the types of speakers in your theater, as some are more directional than others.

With a full Dolby Atmos surround system, you have many sets of speakers that are reflecting sound. However, acoustic panels and other treatments are just one part of the sound equation. The seating, flooring, wall coverings, and other furnishings also serve to absorb sound. A professional home theater designer (like Show & Tell AV) understands how furnishings, décor, speakers, and material choices will affect the sound and can recommend the right acoustic treatment strategy for the space.

While there’s no one way to treat a room – each will be different – you can count on some general principles. Side walls in a surround setup will see the most sound reflectivity, so panels with higher NRC ratings may be used for them. Alternatively, décor such as curtains or other soft wall coverings can serve as part of the treatment. In back walls, diffuser panels help disperse sound waves as opposed to deadening them. You want your movie soundtracks and music to be dynamic, so you don’t want too much muffling that takes away the liveliness.

Additionally, front walls can usually benefit from acoustic treatment on either side of the screen. If you have an acoustically transparent screen with front stage speakers behind it, panels on the front wall can also help with those reflection points from the rear, side surround, and potentially ceiling speakers.