Lepro’s O1 floor lamp is a solid buy, but not because of AI

I’ve been using the Lepro O1 smart floor lamp for a couple weeks now and I quite like it, despite my love/hate relationship with smart lights.

Here’s the thing. I really like the idea of smart lights. Being able to quickly turn lights on with my voice or phone is really handy, and I love being able to adjust my lighting on the fly with brighter whites in the morning and warmer tones at night.

But in practice, smart lights haven’t worked well for me, and often the benefits don’t outweigh the frustrations. For example, I used to have a bunch of Wi-Fi-connected smart bulbs that I gave up on because every couple of weeks, I had to spend hours reconnecting them. (Plus whenever the power went out, all the lights would turn back on when the power came back — that sucked when it happened at 3am.)

Standard but reliable smart light

The floor lamp has a physical button, which is helpful if you ever have connection issues.

The Lepro O1, on the other hand, has been surprisingly reliable with no connection issues. And while I haven’t had any power outages during my time using it, the nature of the light made it a better fit for my family room than my bedroom, so I’m not exactly worried about the occasional late-night illumination should an outage occur.

Setting up the Lepro O1 was very straightforward. It comes out of the box in four parts — the base, two pole pieces, and the light itself — that you need to screw together. And that’s it. The cable is already inserted into the pole pieces, so once everything is screwed together, you plug it in and download the free Lepro app on your phone to connect it to your Wi-Fi and existing smart home setup.

The O1 is a fairly standard floor lamp, all things considered. It uses LEDs to offer colour temperature ranging from 2700 to 5700K and up to 16 million RGB colours. It can get quite bright, but I found 50 per cent to be the ideal brightness level the majority of the time. My family room has a large west-facing window that lets in lots of natural light, so the O1 saw most of its use after sunset when a dimmer, warmer light was preferred.

Lepro packs in most of the LED light features you’d expect. Along with various temperatures of white and tons of RGB colour options, you can do music visualizer, custom lights and even grab designs from the ‘community’ section in the app. If you’ve used any smart light in the last few years, you’ve probably seen these features before.

The Lepro app also lets you group lights together if you have multiple (I didn’t test this as I only have the O1), and you can set rules like shortcuts to turn on certain lights or schedules to have lights turn on or off at specific times. Of course, you can also connect the O1 to Google Home or Amazon Alexa, but Apple HomeKit doesn’t appear to be supported.

Who asked for AI lights?

What is new, at least for me, is Lepro’s AI integration, which the company dubs ‘LightGPM.’ This lets you use the Lepro app to control your lights by talking, typing, or with pictures. This AI integration is kind of Lepro’s whole thing—its website is all about AI. Frankly, it’s pretty dumb.

Does it work? Sorta. Typing a prompt worked for me. I could say I wanted ‘happy’ lighting, and LightGPM would pop out a list of different light options for the O1 that matched. I could also issue basic commands, like turning the light a specific colour. However, in my testing, the ‘voice’ function didn’t work. Instead, the app simply crashed whenever I tried to activate voice mode.

The photo prompt option, on the other hand, had mixed results. You can take a photo with the app or upload one from your image library, and the app will spit out a bunch of options that loosely match. For example, I uploaded a selfie of me sitting on a red chair, and Lepro generated lighting options that mixed the red of the chair with the yellow of the hat I was wearing to an interesting effect. But when I tried uploading a photo of a purple flower, a pop-up warned me that the photo prompt required a face. That’s strange, but a note in the Lepro app claims it’s removing facial recognition in favour of general image recognition in a future update.

Regardless, I’m unsure why anyone would want to use these AI features. Sure, I can ask the app to make the light orange, but I can also just pick orange from the colour picker and call it a day. And I’m even more perplexed by the photo option that requires a face. Even if it were simple image recognition instead of facial recognition, I can’t see myself using the feature more than once or twice. It feels very gimmicky.

But all the AI junk aside, the Lepro O1 is a pretty solid floor lamp. It’s not the most exciting lamp ever, but I like the smart features, and it’s been reliable enough that I didn’t dread trying to use it. I’d say it’s worth considering for anyone who wants a basic LED floor lamp with standard smart features.

The Lepro O1 retails for $189.99 and is available directly from Lepro or through Amazon Canada (though at the time of writing, it was out of stock on Amazon).