Gadgets & Tech Spoken Edition

The sun is a great source of free lighting if you’re in a home with lots of windows. But in the summer months, natural lighting can also quickly turn your home into an oven. Instead of spending all your waking hours opening and closing blinds to block direct blasts of the sun’s rays, Lutron’s new automated smart blinds can make all of those adjustments for you. With companies like Ikea finally making the technology more affordable, smart blinds are joining smart lighting as an accessible home upgrade. But being able to simply remotely open or close your blinds from a mobile, app, or asking your smart assistant to do it for you, isn’t as smart as it could be. Lutron’s new window blinds feature “Natural Light Optimization” functionality which takes into account the location and orientation of your house (using GPS and a smart device’s built-in compass, presumably) as well as the location of all the blinds in your home to automatically open and close them individually throughout the day to let in natural light—b