What’s the best way to brighten up a room? Simple, smart lighting

If you’re an Amazon Alexa user looking for something cheap, Sengled leads the way with a smart flood light that pairs directly with the Echo Plus or Echo Show. If you don’t have either of those, you’ll need the Sengled hub connected to your router. You can find these bulbs on Amazon in a two-pack for $18.

Sengled also makes colour-changing floodlights (and Philips Hue does too, of course). But if you want a coloured bulb, I think it’s worth going with Lifx , an Australian startup that routinely passes our colour quality tests with striking, bright hues that look fantastic. The company’s bulbs all use your Wi-Fi network to talk directly to your router, so they don’t need a hub, they come with an excellent, fully-featured app, and they’re compatible with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant (and IFTTT) out of the box.

A color changing Lifx spotlight costs $50 at Amazon. That’s not cheap, but the Lifx floodlights are also a few hundred lumens brighter at peak settings than any of the competition we’ve tested so far. Combine that with the color quality, and you’re looking at a very worthy upgrade choice.