Lepro Unveils AI-Powered Smart Lights with Built-in Microphones at IFA 2025

Lights With Ears: Lepro's New AI-Powered Lighting Listens to Your Plans

Lighting company Lepro pulled up to IFA (Innovation for All) 2025 with a fun new trick I've haven't seen before in home lighting: Centerpiece lights with microphones equipped to hear voice commands and an LLM-style AI to interpret them. Lepro calls this new line the AI Lighting Pro series. It includes an ultra-stylish tabletop lamp designed like a planetary orbit model, an LED strip light, a neon rope light and a thin floor lamp. One thing they all have in common -- a mic listening for the wake word "Hey Lepro" and an AI design assistant waiting to change the lights at your command. Lepro's setup may sound very familiar to those who already use a voice assistant like Google or Alexa to control their smart lighting or arrange home scenes. However, Lepro's approach differs in a few special ways. First, these lights have mics installed directly on them, which means you're speaking directly to the lights instead of to a voice assistant in your phone or smart speaker. If you don't already have a smart speaker, that may sound sort of weird, but voice assistants generally don't listen all the time, only when activated by their wake word to pay attention. And in this case, you don't need any extra hub for your voice controls, just the lights themselves. Lepro's AI design assistant is also a bit different from the typical voice assistant. Lepro says that it trained the AI on color and design content to help it interpret scenarios and choose the best colors. That means that a user could say something like, "I'm having a birthday party" or "I'm setting a romantic dinner" or simply "I'm in the mood to relax" and the light will adjust without you needing to come up with specific colors yourself. Lepro's software also includes other tricks, such as the ability to create your own DIY scenes and LightBeats music syncing. That's a pretty complete package, especially when you include the onboard mics and voice command options. Lepro plans on releasing its AI Lighting Pro series for sale sometime this year, but there's no word on pricing yet. I'll see if I can get a model to talk about my feelings with and see what colors it offers me in return.

Better get used to your smart lights having built-in microphones

We're all used to having our lights respond to verbal commands at this point. But normally, there's a middleman passing our commands along, whether that's our phone or a smart speaker that is actually listening to what we say. Lepro is eliminating the need for a separate controller by building a microphone directly into the power cord on its new AI Lighting Pro series. The lineup includes a light strip (S1-Pro AI), a rope light (N1-Pro AI), a rail-thin floor lamp (OE1-Pro AI), and a wild-looking table lamp (TB1-Pro AI). The S1 is a pretty standard light strip, while the N1 adds diffusion to create a more seamless look. The OE1 includes RGB and a 2700K warm-white mode for reading and relaxing. And the TB1 has three independently movable and configurable intertwined rings that resemble a gyroscope. There's no word on pricing or when they'll launch in the US outside of "later in 2025." All have a built-in microphone and a voice assistant called LightGPM, which you can summon by saying "Hey Lepro." While the capabilities are limited to controlling the light, the level of control is impressive. It can handle basic stuff like turning lights on and off and changing colors, but it can also use an LLM to create lighting patterns and effects in response to moods or activities like "I'm doing yoga" or "I'm a very stressed-out Mets fan." The lights also have Wi-Fi and can integrate with Alexa and Google Assistant, but that's not what makes them interesting. It's the standalone operation, the addition of yet another device in your home that is always listening. Other manufacturers have built voice control directly into their products, like Roborock and Ecovacs on their vacuums, and Sonos on its speakers, but it's less common on lights (Dollar Tree is clearly a pioneer). The question is, do you need another device in your house listening to your every word and feeding it to an LLM? Maybe not, but chances are you're gonna have to get used to it.

These eye-popping smart lights boast built-in AI microphones

Just say the word, and Lepro's groovy smart lights will set the scene with help from an integrated AI mic, no smart speaker required. Smart lights that react to voice commands spoken to smart speakers are old hat, but a smart light with a built-in AI microphone? That's a new twist. Showing off its wares at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week, Germany-based smart device manufacturer Lepro is teeing up a quartet of "AI Lighting Pro" lights that can set the mood based on your natural-language prompts -- anything from "Give me an Iron Man vibe" to "Set a cyberpunk city theme." Each of the lights features a built-in microphone that captures your commands (you must say the "Hey Lepro" wake phrase first) and processes them using Lepro's new LightGPM AI engine, a large language model that's trained on "color psychology and lighting design," Lepro says. The AI then delivers an "ideal" multi-color lighting scene based on your voice prompt. We've seen plenty of smart lights with AI-powered light scene bots before; Philips Hue is integrating one into the Hue app, and Govee and Nanoleaf have their own versions. But while those AI bots require interacting with an app, Lepro's integrated AI microphones are a novelty, or at least they are for me. (It's worth noting that the brand does have an app for those who like to tinker with their lighting modes manually.) The built-in mics don't just listen for voice commands; they're also keeping an ear out for music, with Lepro's LightBeats tech capable of syncing the smart light's LEDs with the pulse of nearby music sources. (That's a far more common smart light feature, by the way.) Among the lights in Lepro's AI Lighting Pro series are the TB1-Pro, a space-age table lamp with multi-colored and adjustable light rings; the S1-Pro, a flexible LED light strip; the N1-Pro, a neon rope light with a "continuous, dot-free glow"; and the OE1-Pro, a super-slim floor lamp that offers 2,700-Kelvin warm-white light as well as RGB lighting. The AI Lighting Pro lights can all connect directly to home Wi-Fi routers, meaning (for better or worse) there's no need for a hub, and they're all compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Lepro says it will roll out its AI Lighting Pro line in North America later this year; the company has yet to announce pricing details. This news story is part of TechHive's in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting.

IFA 2025: Lepro announces world's first AI lighting collection

By including an integrated AI microphone, you can activate and adjust these lights without needing to be connected to a hub or external speaker. Smart lighting is becoming increasingly popular, as people begin to bring more and more smart products into their home. These devices connect to hubs or AI systems like Apple or Google Home and enable you to turn on lights (or even adjust heating levels) by simply asking Siri, Gemini, Alexa, and so forth to do the hard work. While this is helpful, sometimes connecting everything to one core system can be a nuisance and lead to issues, which is why Lepro has come up with a rather intuitive idea. As part of IFA 2025, the technology maker has revealed a line of AI lights, which are described as the world's first of its kind. Essentially, they operate very much like regular smart lights, except you don't need to connect them in the same way as Philips Hue or Nanoleaf, as once set up you can directly speak with the lights to customise lighting levels, switch them on and off, and so forth, all by simply saying "Hey Lepro" as the initiation command. In total, four products have been announced and these are the TB1-Pro table lamp, the S1-Pro LED strip, the N1-Pro rope light, and the OE1-Pro slim smart floor lamp. All four devices come with the AI-incorporation for hands-free control, Wi-Fi connectivity, and a modern design too. Exact launch plans have yet to be announced, but Lepro intends to debut the first wave of products in North America later this year for an unannounced price range, before then coming to additional regions around the world.