Ideal Smart Home seamlessly anticipates your needs and responds instantly to your commands. There’s no need to open a specific app for each device or remember the exact voice command and voice assistant combination to play the latest episode of your favorite podcast on a nearby speaker. Competing smart home standards make operating your devices unnecessarily complicated. They just aren’t very smart.
Tech giants are straddling standards by offering voice assistants as the top control layer, but Alexa can’t talk to Google Assistant or Siri or control Google or Apple devices, or vice versa. (And so far, no single ecosystem has produced all the best devices.) But those interoperability woes may soon be solved. An open-source interoperability standard known as Matter, formerly known as Project CHIP (Connected Home over IP), is coming in 2022. With big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google on board, seamless integration may finally be possible.
Update May 2024: Added news of the Matter 1.3 spec release, progress from key players, a section on what Matter can do, and details on potential features.
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what happened?
Matter makes different devices and ecosystems work well together: Device manufacturers must adhere to the Matter standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, etc. For those building a smart home, Matter theoretically means you can buy any device and control it using your preferred voice assistant or platform (yes, you can use different voice assistants to talk to the same product).
For example, you can buy a Matter-enabled smart light bulb and set it up with Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa without worrying about compatibility. Today, some devices already support multiple platforms (such as Alexa and Google Assistant), but Matter will expand platform support, making it faster and easier to set up new devices.
The first protocol runs over Wi-Fi and Thread network layers and uses Bluetooth Low Energy for device setup. It supports a range of platforms, but you have to choose which voice assistant and app you want to use. There is no central Matter app or assistant. Because Matter works on your local network, you can expect smart home devices to be more responsive and continue to work even if the internet goes down.
What makes substances different?
The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance) manages the Matter standard. What makes it unique is its large membership (over 550 technology companies), willingness to adopt and integrate disparate technologies, and the fact that it is an open source project. Interested companies can use the software development kit (SDK) royalty-free to integrate their devices into the Matter ecosystem, which is much easier than certifying devices individually with each smart home platform.
Growing out of the Zigbee Alliance, Matter has built a solid foundation. Bringing the major smart home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings) to the same table is a big achievement. It would be optimistic to imagine seamless adoption across the board, but there is a lot of excitement around the fact that many smart home brands are on board, including August, Schlage, and Yale in smart locks, Belkin, Cync, GE Lighting, Sengled, Signify (Philips Hue), and Nanoleaf in smart lighting, and Arlo, Comcast, Eve, TP-Link, and LG among others.
When did the material arrive?
Matter has been in development for years. The initial release of Project CHIP was planned for late 2020, but was delayed to the following year, rebranded as Matter, and then advertised for a summer release. After further delays, the Matter 1.0 specification and certification program launched in 2022. SDKs, tools, and test cases are now available, and eight accredited test labs have opened for product certification.
The first wave of Matter-enabled smart home gadgets launched in fall 2022, and have been rolling out steadily since then. The first update to the spec, Matter 1.1, was released in May 2023 and consisted mostly of bug fixes. Matter 1.2, announced in October 2023, added support for nine new devices, including refrigerators, robot vacuums, and air purifiers, as well as improvements to existing categories.
The Matter 1.3 spec will be released in May 2024, adding support for energy management, EV charging, and water management, as well as new devices like ovens, stoves, washer-dryers, etc. It also improves Matter Casting, so not only can you cast from your smartphone to your TV, but other smart devices like a robot vacuum can also send messages to your TV to alert you if it gets stuck, for example.
