The Brilliant Control smart light switch looked impressive enough when it was announced back in early 2017, with an elegant design, a combination of physical and touchscreen controls, and integrated support for Amazon’s Alexa that would make the smart light switch a natural hub for a smart home.
And at CES 2018, Brilliant announced that it’s integrating Amazon’s “Display Cards” — an extension of the Alexa API that lets third-party devices with screens show the same visual results that you’d get with an Echo Show — into the Brilliant Control, essentially letting users get the same sort of visual, interactive experience to queries as they would on Amazon’s own hardware.
The Display Cards work more or less as expected in action, with scrollable cards and visual information popping up in response to queries. It’s not quite as full fledged as the Echo Show — for example, asking Amazon to play video content didn’t work — but for most of what you’d want to get done on something in the Brilliant Control’s form factor, anyway.
Brilliant envisions users using the display cards for weather, news, and getting responses to simple questions, since tasks like getting recipes or watching videos probably don’t make a lot of sense for a light switch, even one as fancy as the Brilliant Control.
The Brilliant Control starts at $199, and will be available sometime in early 2018.