UK smart home firm Tewke is working with California-based audio equipment manufacturer Sonos to add music to its smart energy and lighting controller.

This is the latest evolution of Tewke Tap as it moves towards being the central control point for the home, bringing together lighting, energy, home health and music through a single intuitive device.

The latest development is Music View, enabling Sonos users of the most recent S2 speakers and original S1 speakers to control their music intuitively without having to take their phones out of their pockets.

Smart home technology has traditionally meant adding more devices, more apps, more sensors and more complexity. Tewke is taking a different approach. Installed where a traditional light switch would go, Tap is designed to make smart living accessible without the complexity normally associated with professionally installed smart home systems. It provides lighting control, energy insight and home health information where people naturally interact with their homes, and now music.

“Tap was never intended to be a static product,” said Piers Daniell, CEO of Tewke (www.tewke.com). “Because Tap is software based, we can continually add capabilities and make it more useful over time. Our ambition is to remove the noise and complexity that has traditionally surrounded the smart home and give people one beautifully simple way of understanding and controlling more of their home.”

Just launched, Music View brings control of a home’s sound system directly to the wall. The feature is initially being delivered through an integration with Sonos (www.sonos.com), Tewke’s first music partner, with the plan to add support for other audio systems over time.

Householders will be able to use Tap to play and pause music, skip tracks, select music from the current playlist or queue, choose where music is playing, and control volume throughout the home or in individual rooms. The OLED screen displays the album artwork of the currently playing track alongside the familiar audio controls.

Control is no longer restricted to the person with the music system app on their phone. Anyone in the household can interact with the system directly through Tap, whether that’s a child wanting to change the music or a guest at a party knowing the next track.

Music View (www.tewke.com/music) also displays the current album artwork as the screen saver when the user moves away from Tap, using its inbuilt mm-wave radar to detect when someone is near or far from the device.