Amazon's Alexa is learning to control another smart home product: Lutron's series of Caséta lights. Starting today, owners of Caséta lights will be able to issue commands through Alexa, which is currently built into the Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, and Fire TV. That could make Caséta lights easier to manage for people with large homes, since Amazon's products work as additional control points throughout the house.

Alexa is becoming a viable smart home hub

Caséta lights launched in 2014. They also support other smart home systems, like Works With Nest and Apple's HomeKit, although you need a specific hub for the latter.

Since the beginning of this year, Alexa has become a surprisingly competent way to control popular smart home products. More and more of them are integrating with Amazon's voice assistant so that it's getting to the point where Alexa is becoming the central hub that everyone has always wanted. Amazon needs companies to keep adding support for that to happen, but there's no sign of Alexa's growth slowing down.