DALI doesn’t speak Siri. We fixed that.

DALI and the smart home have long lived in two separate worlds. Professionals chose DALI for its reliability, precision and open standard. Homeowners, as well as restaurant, retail and hotel owners, want Apple Home, Google Home and the simple pleasure of asking Siri or Alexa to dim the lights.

Lighting designers have been caught in between. How do you specify lighting so that the controls simply work? Do lighting control companies even understand lighting designers? Designers have grown used to struggling with keypads, proprietary apps, or a call to the integrator every time something needs to change. Too often, the light that was designed was never the light that was lived.

Two portfolios, one room

The same gap exists inside the lighting industry itself. Many luminaire manufacturers have one portfolio for professional lighting, controlled by DALI, and another for decorative lighting, often built for the smart home. In a real villa or hotel suite, both portfolios meet in the same room, and the user rightly expects to control them together from Apple Home, Google Home, Siri or Alexa.

Until now, that meant separate systems and separate apps. As a Matter company, we solve this at the root: SmartCore brings the DALI portfolio into Matter, so professional and decorative luminaires sit side by side in the same app, in the same scene and under the same voice command.

Built for professionals first

Our concept is simple, but making it real demanded excellence. We designed SmartCore in Switzerland to meet professional expectations first. It is a full DALI-2 controller on a single DIN rail, commissioned in minutes from a web browser without any special software.

Everything runs locally: the configuration lives on the device, and the lights keep working even when the internet does not. One SmartCore can also run the blinds, heating and access control of an entire apartment or hotel room, so fewer devices do more, with less energy and less complexity.

Once those professional expectations were met, we did what we do best as a Matter company: we added Matter to the device. The result is a home or hotel where DALI downlights and decorative luminaires respond to the same scene, the same tap and the same voice command, and where the installation is as reliable in ten years as on the day it was handed over.

Respecting everyone’s role

Innovation, for us, also means respecting everyone’s role in the process. The lighting designer needs precision: individual addressing, groups, scenes and tunable white, so the design is executed exactly as intended. The installer needs a straightforward path to get there: SmartCore is commissioned in a web browser, where a DALI line can be addressed, grouped and tested in minutes, without special software, training courses or certification. The owner needs none of this complexity at all, only light that responds naturally to a tap, an automation or a voice command.

Designing one product that serves all three meant making it technical enough to deliver what the designer wants, yet simple enough that nobody needs an education to use it. All intelligence runs locally, with no cloud and no data leaving the building, and regular firmware updates keep the product evolving as the Matter standard grows.

The light that gets lived

For years, our industry accepted a quiet compromise: professional lighting or a simple experience, never both. Designers designed, installers installed, and owners made do with whatever was left once everyone had gone home.

We don’t believe anyone in that chain should have to choose. When the standard professionals trust meets the apps people already love, the design survives the handover. It stops being a drawing in a tender document and becomes the light someone switches on when they come home.

If you are a lighting designer, an installer or a luminaire manufacturer who has felt this gap, we would love to show you SmartCore in a real installation. Let’s make sure the next light you design is the light that gets lived.

There has been a gap in lighting, and SmartCore closes it.