Amazon Starting Slowly With Matter for 'Best Customer Experience'

Richardson referenced the transition from “standards development to standards adoption,” saying the Matter spec has been downloaded 4,400 downloaded times since its release a month ago (see 2210140046) and the Matter software development kit from GitHub 2,500 times. Products shown at the launch event included blinds, occupancy sensors, weather devices, smart plugs, door locks, lighting, gateways, platform components and Matter-based apps. “The industry has finally figured this out,” Richardson said: “That’s the biggest part.” Next it’s up to product makers to determine how fast they bring products to market, he said.

CSA’s update schedule calls for two releases a year of the standard and within those, “dot releases” that add functionality for different categories, Richardson said. Members will focus on making sure there’s a “continuous improvement process,” he said. That includes finding any “glitches” as products first hit the market to "make sure that those are brought back in quickly so we’re delivering a very stable environment for the standard.”

The launch event was "the beginning of a journey,” Richardson said, and that includes getting more companies on board. “We’re not just delivering a spec and putting it up on the web and seeing what people do,” Richardson said, saying close to 200 products are coming out in the first 30 days. Twenty companies joined CSA in the past 30 days; about 280 are in CSA's Matter Working Group. Eventually, CSA expects “hundreds more companies” to join Matter to build devices and create new device categories. “There’s a lot of work continuing in new device categories,” Richardson said.

Marja Koopmans, Amazon director-smart home, said Matter will mean more choice of technologies for developers when they build smart home devices. For customers, it means more selection when they put together their smart home. Today customers can mix and match over 30,000 Works with Alexa devices to create an experience with Alexa, she noted, and Matter will give consumers more choices to customize their smart home experience over time. Amazon believes it can provide more value to customers faster “if we work together across the industry vs. going at it alone."

Amazon will provide the option to add local Matter connectivity along with managed cloud connections to its Alexa Connect Kit SDK for Matter, Koopmans said, announcing the launch of Works with Alexa certification requirements for Matter devices. The company is providing developers differentiated ambient experiences by extending Alexa features through the Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit, she said. The release of Matter 1.0 is a “great first step,” she said, but ensuring the best customer experience is the top consideration “before releasing Matter to customers. We need to get it right as customers have come to rely on their smart home.”

That’s especially important when implementing a standard over more than 100 million devices spanning 30 Echo and eero device models and affecting “tens of millions of customers around the globe,” Koopmans said. Amazon will focus on delivering a “high-quality customer experience” starting with Matter over Wi-Fi spanning 17 Echo devices -- plugs, switches and bulbs at first -- with setup over Android, she said. The company will follow early next year with Matter over Thread, more Echo and eero devices, plus additional device types with setup over iOS, she said.

The approach allows Amazon to roll out Matter support for “the most common device types and the most prevalent network in customers’ homes, while we continue to work through interoperability, stability and longevity testing with our partners, ensuring customers a high-quality experience with Alexa,” Koopsman said. Amazon is partnering with Samsung to make it easy for customers to use Alexa or Samsung’s SmartThings platform to set up Matter devices initially and then control them using both smart home systems, Amazon said.

A protocol that supports Thread, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, internet and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on a single chip has the benefit of cost, lower power and form factor, said Manish Kothari, Silicon Labs senior vice president-software development. Silicon Labs’ MG24 SoC has Zigbee and Thread running on the same device with Bluetooth, so existing devices in the home will be able transition “to this new world seamlessly,” Kothari said. It also has a unified multiprotocol SDK running on bridges and controllers to bridge Z-Wave and Zigbee. Matter isn't a “step function” but a transition that “needs to be smooth and really a great experience for the customers,” he said.

On managing expectations about consumers' ability to have instant interoperability when they buy a product with the Matter logo, Richardson said the near term for Matter is about ensuring stability and “making sure that everything works as it does.” A lot of Matter-certified products "will work out of the gate,” he said. “There will be some that will have hiccups,” he said, citing the nature of nascent technology.

When that happens, Matter players will work to quickly secure and fix the issues, he said. Mechanisms built into the standard, such as over-the-air upgrades, will ensure that, as the standard evolves, “security evolves, so we have a way to bring in new security regimes into the devices themselves.” When CSA brings a standard to market, it involves “thousands of hours of testing” and getting companies together in physical locations, he noted.

Looking at Matter two or three years from now, Richardson said, “It can and should be easily working; it just works. I look for a connected product and for the cute little logo, and I just … choose what I want from the device and the experience, and I’ll let all the companies sort out the rest.” Consumers have products in their homes today “that will be Matter tomorrow with over-the-air upgrades,” he said.