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Olie is a smart lamp with Alexa and wireless charging built in

Olie is a smart lamp with Alexa and wireless charging built in

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Talk to the lamp

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One of the most popular uses of digital assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant is to turn on and off lights. So why not just save a step in that process and build a digital assistant directly into a table or floor lamp?

That’s the idea behind Olie, the latest project from InstruMMents looking for funding on Indiegogo. (The company was founded by the creators of the Misfit Shine and had previously crowdfunded the InstruMMent 01 measuring device.) The product is a smart lamp with integrated support for either Google Assistant or Alexa. In other words: it turns a lamp into an Echo or Google Home.

Olie comes in a few versions: there are both standing and table lamp sizes, and each of those comes in spot and area light variants. The table lamp also includes a Qi wireless charger built in, which the company says should support fast charging. And for people who don’t particularly want a voice-activated assistant, there’s also a version of the table lamp with just the wireless charger.

Olie is machined out of aluminum, is controlled manually using a touch-sensitive button on the top of the lamp, and still fits in a four-microphone far-field array for the voice assistants.

InstruMMents claims to be planning to ship Olie in June 2018, so the usual warnings about crowdfunding products apply. That said, the company has managed to successfully ship a hardware product from Indiegogo before, so there’s at least comfort in the fact that it’s already been down this road.

Olie starts at an Indiegogo early-bird price of $64 for the table lamp with just a wireless charger, or $89 for either the table lamp with both the charger and voice assistant, or the floor lamp with just a voice assistant.