Sonos has announced a new Lutron integration that lets you control your lights, dimmers and shades using Sonos Voice Control.

The integration connects Sonos to Lutron’s Caséta system, allowing your Sonos speaker to become part of the wider smart home rather than simply being the thing that plays music… like an Alexa speaker but dialled down a few notches.

Once connected, you can use your voice to control compatible Lutron lights, dimmers and shades, alongside the usual music commands.

You’ll need a Sonos speaker with Sonos Voice Control enabled, a Sonos account, a Lutron account and a Lutron Smart Hub.

Supported Lutron systems include Caséta, RadioRA 2 Select, RadioRA 3 and HomeWorks, although the original RadioRA 2 and Vive systems aren’t on the list.

Lutron’s Pico audio remote can also control Sonos speakers without needing to open the Sonos app, letting you play and pause music, skip tracks, change the volume and switch between favorite stations or playlists.

You can also create presets that bring your music, lighting and shades together, so a single action can set the mood rather than requiring you to control each part of the room separately.

For example, you could set up a movie scene that dims the lights, closes the shades and sets your Sonos system to the right volume, or a disco scene that combines your preferred lighting with music.

Lutron has supported Sonos integration through Caséta for some time, but the addition of Sonos Voice Control gives the partnership a more hands-free smart home angle.

It follows Sonos' partnership with Philips Hue, which saw Sonos Voice Control move beyond music for the first time.

That integration lets you use a compatible Sonos speaker to turn Hue lights on and off, adjust brightness, change colors and activate lighting scenes.

Rather than trying to compete directly with Alexa, Google Home or Siri as a comprehensive smart home platform, Sonos is adding specific features - with specific brands - to use the speakers already sitting around your home as convenient control points for other devices.

Lutron is a good fit because it adds shades as well as lighting, and because its physical Pico remotes give Sonos another way into the smart home that doesn't involve voice or a phone.

After a pretty miserable 18 months or so following the disastrous 2024 redesign of its app, Sonos finally looks like it's getting back on track.

The latest Sonos app redesign - now available in public beta - isn’t actually a completely new app, but CEO Tom Conrad described the latest changes as a new way of navigating the existing app, following months of studying how people use Sonos and identifying the parts of the interface that were causing the most friction.

The new navigation has a cleaner tabbed interface, improved speaker management, the ability to reorder and favorite systems and a redesigned volume control on iOS.

It’s in beta as Sonos is initially making the changes optional while it gathers feedback, rather than forcing another major interface overhaul on everyone at once.

It might sound like a fairly low-key software update, but after the mess surrounding the 2024 app launch, it's arguably one of the most important things Sonos has done in years.

And it’s clear the once-undisputed multi-room audio champion is also now starting to make better use of the hardware people already own.