Amazon, Apple and Google have joined forces to form a new standard for smart home devices, now called “Matter”. And Philips Hue has just announced that there will be a future update for its products that will make all Hue products compatible with Matter.
Matter was announced just a few days ago. It’s the new name for the Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) that the three companies have been working on. And it is looking to roll out as soon as late 2021. So it’s going to be here in no time. This unified protocol should allow for new smart home products and older devices (that are still compatible) to work with smart home assistants like Amazon Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant.
What is Matter?
The goal of Matter is pretty simple actually. The goal here is to make sure you’re able to use your smart home devices with the voice assistant of your choice. Whether you want to use Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri/Homekit or Google Assistant, you can use any of these, or all of them, if you wanted too. So it would be similar to how Sonos works with Assistant and Alexa.
This is going to make it much simpler when buying smart home devices. As you won’t really need to worry about whether it supports the smart assistant that you want to use.
Matter already has some pretty big names on-board, in addition to Amazon, Apple and Google. Philips Hue of course, just announced that it will support Matter in future products and provide a software update to previous products to support it. The Zigbee Alliance is also on-board. It will rename itself to the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) and it will expand to focus on more projects like Matter, as well as the existing Zigbee network – so Zigbee is not going away.