In early 2019, Michelle Turner sat down to dinner with her colleague Grant Erickson. They were joined at the Woodside restaurant in Silicon Valley by two of their colleagues from Amazon and two from Apple. Both Turner and Erickson worked for Google. The dinner was hosted by Tobin Richardson and John Osborne of the Zigbee Alliance. The purpose of the evening was simple: fix the smart home.
Turner, senior director of Google Smart Home Ecosystem, and Erickson, then a software engineer at Google, agreed to meet with their competitors to find a solution to the main points of battle in smart home: reliability, connectivity, setup and “the problem of Although this was not the first conversation between the companies, it was a significant step forward in the Zigbee Alliance’s ongoing efforts to unite the industry and meet the challenge of interoperability in the smart home.
“Grant, who was also president of the Thread Group at the time, was talking to us inside Google about how to solve some of the bigger problems in the smart home,” Turner recalls. “We knew we had the basic technology to start tackling this, but there are many things we can fix. Grant made an offer. The people of Apple and the people of Amazon obviously have points of view, too. But we could all see the bigger picture of what had to happen. “
Turner recalled that they left the meeting with a draft proposal agreed by all parties and committed to continue it. Originally known internally as Project Unity, it went public just before CES 2020 as Project Chip (Connected Home over IP). Shortly afterwards – along with the rebranding of the Zigbee Alliance to the Connectivity Standards Alliance – the fruits of this Woodside dinner became Matter: the new smart home standard for interoperability and an unprecedented industrial coalition.
The Verge agreed with Turner before Google I / O this week to hear how the company plans to implement Matter when it finally arrives later this year and what it will mean for users of Google Nest products and the Google Home app. .
Google has confirmed that all of its existing Nest Smart Speakers and Displays will be upgraded with an over-the-air firmware update to support Matter, allowing you to use Google Voice Assistant to control any Matter-enabled device in your home , no matter who did it. He will also update his Google Home speaker and say that Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub Max and Nest Hub (2nd generation) will serve as Thread’s border routers. Thread is a low-power network protocol that allows devices to talk to each other locally without a hub, using border routers to route packets of information around your house. Along with Wi-Fi, Thread is a key component of Matter.
The Google Nest Hub Max will be one of three Google Nest devices that will act as Thread’s border router when the Matter arrives. Photo by The Verge
This interview has been slightly edited and shortened for clarity.
The issue has developed significantly since this first meeting and there have been delays and failures. Do you still feel confident in this original vision that it is coming true and is on track to achieve what you set out to do at that Woodside dinner three years ago?
Michelle Turner: Yes. And in fact, I think it goes beyond our original vision in some ways. It was incredibly inspiring to see the enthusiasm and acceptance and the number of companies that joined the CSA and the Matter working group. We are in 200 companies – it’s amazing.
I think the CSA made the right call [on the latest delay]. We need to make sure that we have a lot of high quality devices in people’s homes. It must work properly. This is super complicated. Partners need to make sure that the multi-administrator is working properly [a key feature of Matter that allows devices to work with any platform simultaneously]that they work not only with Google Nest controllers, but also with Amazon controllers, Apple controllers, Samsung controllers. The complexity of this is very high.
How will Matter change the smart home experience for the Google Home user?
For the Google Home user, I think the larger areas of Matter where they will first see a change are in the setup of your devices. I just set up some lighting in my mother-in-law’s house and it still took me 45 minutes to set up four lamps. It didn’t have to be that hard. The first thing will be a much simpler setup.
“The reality is that people have iPhones and Android phones in their homes. Some of them want to use HomeKit. ”
The second part is the speed and reliability of the local network. This was a big sore point for consumers. My team spent a lot of time working with partners to improve reliability and reduce latency. Because in our mind, if it’s not as fast as a lamp switch, what’s the point? We believe that Matter will significantly reduce these latency numbers and improve the overall reliability of home devices.
Then I think interoperability for consumers will be a big part. As much as we all love using Google Assistant, the reality is that people have iPhones and Android phones in their homes. Some of them want to use HomeKit. Today, we simply do not have such compatibility for consumers. And I think that’s difficult. Being able to have many administrators who really work well between these ecosystems will be of great benefit to consumers.
Then our long-term goal is to build what we call a proactive home. Instead of having a whole bunch of connected devices, how do we build this truly proactive home that works for the benefit of consumers? … Matter will be absolutely fundamental to this. This is the architecture behind the proactive home. If we don’t have a reliable home, if we don’t work locally, if it doesn’t work consistently, we can’t keep that promise.
The proactive home really is that smart layer, whether it’s able to anticipate going upstairs, 10 is at night and I always go into my bedroom at this time, so turn on the lights for me; or, watching TV, it’s 9:30, the kids are in bed and I get a notification on my phone that the lights have just turned on in the child’s bedroom. is anyone sick Do they watch YouTube? Ability to detect anomalies. Now, Matter doesn’t do that. But it is fundamental to be able to activate the rest of this. Because if this basic foundation of the home – the smart home – is not solid, the rest just doesn’t work.
Illustration of a new user interface for setting up smart home devices using Google Home and Matter. Image: Google Nest
Do you have ready-made features like this? Can we expect a significant change in the way we use our smart homes from day one? Or will it be a slower build?
It will be more of a construction. We need to get these intelligence signals, and then we need to actually apply machine learning to them. We need to get enough of them to be able to build models for machine learning, to build algorithms around, to start making these predictive models.
Today we have some of this data outside the cloud. We used it in the routine for home and outside. But that we deviate from the signals of the geozone and the PIR sensor, which is in the thermostat. It took us years to do it right. And we have a lot of data coming from these sources. We will now have matter sensors as a device on the first side. Sensors are crucial to be able to understand and control this type of predictive intelligence in the home. … But it will take time to import the signals and build these models. They have to work exactly. You don’t want your lights on at 2 o’clock in the morning because some signal went wrong.
“The biggest misconception is that Matter will solve every IoT problem.”
You mention that sensors are key to a smart home. Is Google exploring other ways to monitor beyond small white plastic boxes? At last year’s Google Smart Home Developers meeting, you discussed technologies such as ultra-wideband for fine location tracking that could potentially be implemented in a smart home. Is this something related to Matter? Or is it something more specific to the technologies you develop within your own ecosystem?
It is not directly related to Matter. We are working with third-party partners who use UWB today to try to build some of these more seamless experiences at home. But right now, in the area of Google’s smart home, we’re mostly working with some of our third-party home security partners on how to use UWB alerts for things like no-frills [a security system turning off automatically when you walk in]. This is something that is coming.
How will Google Nest devices work with Thread and Matter? It has been announced which will be upgraded to Matter and which will be border routers. Can you tell us a little bit about how this will work in Google’s smart home powered by Matter?
Our Nest Hub Max and Nest Hub (2nd generation) will be able to act as Thread border routers, and we are actively considering other devices that may need Thread, as Thread has been part of our strategy for a long time. We now consider the topology of the home. We understand the mix of devices in general in homes and want to expand this Thread footprint with our partners such as Nanoleaf and others. We have many …
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