Custom AI Behaviors, the natural-language automation feature Philips Hue announced at IFA in September, are now live. They arrive with version 6.4.0 of the Hue app, which Hueblog reported on October 29, 2026 as available in Apple's App Store, with the Google Play release expected soon. Last week Hue shipped Bridge Pro firmware that prepared the bridge for the feature but left it switched off. This app update is the missing half.

What you need

The feature only works with the Hue Bridge Pro, and the bridge has to be on the latest firmware. The older white Hue Bridge is not supported. Hue's own pitch is that you can "create richer, more personalized automations for your lights and accessories simply by describing what you want".

The assistant is reachable from several places: the AI Assistant icon on the home screen, inside rooms and zones, in the Automations tab, and in the settings for switches and sensors. That last one matters, because programming what a button or a motion sensor does has been one of the more rigid parts of the Hue app.

First tests are mixed

Hueblog's Fabian tested it remotely with a simple brief: two specific lamps in a room should turn on at sunset, each day with a different one of ten soft scenes. The assistant understood the request and created the automation and scenes. But the scenes switched on every light in the room, not just the two lamps. When he told the AI to use only those two and ignore the rest, it gave up with an error message. His guess is that the workaround is to make a zone containing only those two lamps first.

The bigger problem, in his view, is that there is no way to edit an AI-created automation manually in the Hue app. If the assistant misreads you, you can only try rephrasing.

A commenter under the article reported more issues with switches. After setting up a smart button with a Custom AI Behavior, the normal behaviour menu for that switch disappeared, along with the press-and-hold option. On a Tap Dial switch, configuring one button with the AI appeared to reset the other buttons, and the dial itself could then only be set up through the AI. These are single user reports, not confirmed bugs, and the commenter still called the feature a big step forward.

Other changes in 6.4.0

  • SpatialAware now works with zones, not only rooms. Open a zone, tap (+) and choose "Add SpatialAware map".
  • The scene gallery recommends scenes for a room or zone based on the time of day.
  • Screen sync setup is easier: you pinch and zoom to place the corners and can see when auto-tuning to the on-screen content has finished.

If you control Hue lights from Home Assistant or another hub, none of this changes your setup. Custom AI Behaviors run on the Bridge Pro, and it is not yet clear whether the automations they create show up to other systems through the Hue API.