At the developer event “Alexa Live”, Amazon has numerous innovations for the digital voice assistant Alexa and new options for developers in skill programming as well as support for the new smart home standard Matter announced for its own devices in the Echo family.
Since Amazon belongs to the CHIP (Connected Home over IP) project group, which designed the manufacturer-independent, license-free smart home standard, it was already assumed that Amazon's own products would support the new standard in the near future. Among other things, Matter ensures that devices and software from different manufacturers can interact with one another without any problems and that not every smart home system is an isolated system that cannot be linked to the user's other smart home devices. With support for Bluetooth Low Energy, WLAN, Ethernet and Thread, Matter supports several transmission standards.
Almost all Echo receive support for Matter
Amazon will roll out Matter via updates on the devices of the Echo family, whereby almost all Echo and Echo Dot and all Echo Studio, Echo Flex, Echo Plus and Echo Show should support the new standard . Amazon has not yet announced which generations of the Echo and Echo Dot are not compatible with Matter. Even the date for the update, with which Matter is supported, has not yet been narrowed down by Amazon.
While users benefit from extensive interoperability and compatibility with the Echo devices, Amazon also wants to help developers develop Matter-certified devices.
Many manufacturers rely on Matter
In addition to industry giants such as Google, Apple, Samsung and Amazon, many manufacturers have now announced their support for Matter, including Signify (Philips Hue), Ikea, Huawei, WiZ, Yale, Nanoleaf and Eve, to name just a small selection. Signify is planning a firmware update for the Philips Hue Bridge for Philips Hue, for example, to support Matter, so that users do not have to purchase new devices in order to benefit from the new smart home standard. Google and Apple are already installing Thread in their new devices and will support Matter in the future, although Google has not yet activated Thread, but will first activate the function.
Update 07/21/2021 7:15 pm
As Amazon ComputerBase announced, only the Echo (1st generation), Echo Dot (1st generation) and Echo Tap will not receive Matter support. All other Echo devices should support the new smart home standard with a corresponding update.
ComputerBase has received information about this article from Amazon under NDA. The only requirement was the earliest possible publication time.