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GE has integrated Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service into a prototype LED table lamp, the first in a planned suite of connected products.

The company envisions homeowners gathering around the “C by GE” lamp to “order your dinner, listen to the latest headlines, preheat your oven, or give a host of other voice commands.”

With an embedded speaker and microphones, the voice-controlled lamp/personal assistant is hailed as the first lighting product to incorporate Alexa. The system operates on its own without a hub or connected smartphone, according to GE. Plug in the lamp and connect to Alexa to “unleash a whole new world of tech functionality and smart device interoperability throughout the home.”

The lamp will be available for pre-order in early 2017 on CbyGE.com with product availability slated for the second quarter of 2017. It will be designed in part by Richard Clarkson, designer of The Cloud, a cloud-shaped ceiling fixture that produces a motion-triggered lightning and thunder performance.

Jeff Patton, general manager of GE Lighting’s Connected Home Products group said: “This integration is so much more than connecting lighting to voice integration. It’s really about simplifying and extending an experience for consumers, allowing them to add smart capabilities throughout the home through a really simple form factor. Consumers don’t need a cell phone, a special switch or a hub. They just need their voice.”

GE said it is incubating a suite of connected products, through GE Lighting’s C by GE brand, and working with ecosystem partners to create a seamless connected experience that elevates what you can do at home, helping you free up time, add security, enable broader control and have fun doing it.

From the press release:

The connected home market is expected to grow threefold over the next few years, and consumers expect a seamless experience as part of that process. This introduction springboards that by leveraging something ubiquitous in the home today—lighting.

“We’re excited to work with GE Lighting to bring Alexa to their LED lamp and enable new types of voice experiences,” said Aaron Brown, director of Alexa. “Voice is the future of home automation and the combination of Alexa with the GE LED table lamp, provides people with a simple and frictionless way to interact with their homes.”

To propel the connected home experience, GE is not only relying on inventors within its own walls, but drawing inspiration from companies like Amazon, real-world homeowners it’s learning from and incubating with everyday inventors. The Alexa-enabled GE lamp drew inspiration from GE Lighting’s real-world living labs, whereby the company tests lighting and connected home features and functionality with real-world consumers to learn and iterate based on their feedback.

The concept also was influenced by a recent crowdsourcing challenge where GE, Masker Media and Hackster partnered to solicit makers, from college students to data scientists, to bring LEDs to life in new and unexpected ways. The winning ideas, which will be considered as part of future connected lighting designs, included lighting that notifies you when you are sitting idle for too long and encourages you to get moving; lighting-based motion detection that syncs with security services; a lit crib mobile that detects a baby’s heart rate and oxygen levels to protect against SIDS; and lighting that tracks activity in the home to know who is home and where they are to customize lighting based on an individual’s preferences and habits.

For more information, visit CbyGE.com.