The future of the Matter standard

Hello and welcome to the Verdecast, the flagship podcast of ultra wide band door locks. I'm your friend David Pearce and today on the show, we are answering your questions about the smart home. We get a lot of questions about the smart home. I would say that it is the single most popular thing on the Virgast Hotline, eight six Verge one, or send us an email Virgast . com. So every once in a while, Jen Tuy comes on the show and just answers as many of your questions as we can. We also have the new Google Home speaker in house. We've been testing this new smart home device from Google, and we both have some thoughts about what this thing actually is. We're gonna get to all of that in just a second, but first, here's everything else happening on the verge today . This is ninety seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, june twenty fourth, twenty twenty six. Open AI just revealed its first AI chip, which is for some reason called jalapeno. I don't know. It's specifically an inference chip, which means it's not for training huge models but for interacting with them. OpenAI has been working with Broadcom on these chips and if they're good, they're actually a huge deal. Nvidia became the world's most valuable company in large part by having the best AI chips around and everyone else would love to control their own destiny a little more and stop meeting Nvidia so badly. Plus, OpenAI desperately needs to figure out a way to make AI usage cheaper and more energy efficient, all of which it says Jalapenia will do. We'll see about all that when it launch es later this year. Meanwhile, big day for price reveals. We finally know what Grand Theft Auto six will cost when it finally actually apparently for real seriously launches this November. It's going to be eighty bucks for the standard version, which is unfortunately increasingly the price of high end games or a hundred bucks for the ultimate version. Preorders start tonight and you get some cool added gear and you might even get the game early if you preorder. But you know what you apparently can't get at all is a disc with the game on it. Imagine, even the quote unquote physical version of GTA six is just a box with a download code in it. Does that even count as a physical version? That's up to you. I say no, it absolutely does not. Meanwhile, the slate truck, the extremely minimalist pickup truck with no paint or spe akers or power windows finally has a price tag. It's going to start at twenty four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars . That makes it the cheapest pickup and the cheapest EV you'll find pretty much anywhere on the market right now. People have been really interested in this thing , and I suspect the price tag is only gonna be good news. And finally, it's Amazon Prime Day and we're tracking all the best deals everywhere. But here's my main recommendation. A lot of Apple Gear is on sale right now and you should jump on those deals. Apple CEO Tim Cook said recently that prices are about to go up, so I would buy while the buying is good. You can read more about all of this at the Verge. com. That is ninety seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, june twenty fourth. Let's get to some of your smart home questions. Join me now the Virginus Gen Tui, hi Jen. Hi, David. You are somewhere on a college campus being collegiate and having lots of school spirit. . Oh, the school spirit. Yes, this is the South . Go to Tigers . It's June, so it's not football season, but it is always football season. Always football season in the South. That is very much the case. Well, I appreciate you jumping on and doing this with this. We have a couple of smart homey questions to get to. But first, I want to talk about something that we have been asked about a lot over the last nine months because it has taken this thing nine months to ship to the world, which is the Google Home speaker. You have one waiting for you at home. I have one sitting right here next to me. It's a red . It's very red. I will say my immediate response was like when you fill out a form to get products like this from Google and they make you sort of list in order what colors you want. And I was like, how do I say I only want the red under no circumstances should you send me anything else? I find this story completely fascinating in part because my sort of early returns on twenty four hours using it are that it's a pretty good speaker. It plays music, it sounds like a thousand times better than the Echo Mini. I have a Logitech Wonder Boom, the little Blues speaker that I use for everything all the time, and I think I like this better than that. Like as a little thing for playing music, it's pretty impressive. But I find myself wondering the same thing you and I have been asked many times , which is why on earth should I trust Google to be my smart home platform of the future . This is the first Google Home speaker in six years. Google has seemed at various times to care deeply about doing the smart home and smart speakers and then at times to completely forget that it does any of these things . So give me a sense this thing is ninety nine dollars, it's red, it's cool. I like it. It seems almost sort of irresponsible to tell people to buy it because of Google's commitment to this thing. How should I feel about this? So this is kind of the story for all the major platforms, honestly. And we've had Anish Katakaran on the Virgas. We talked with him, and he's the head of Google Home and he gave an impassioned defense of Google and the Smart Home because and I just spent a few days at a conference around matter where all of the engineers and people that make the smart home for these big platforms were there and they are all fully in on the smart home and matter. But the question is, are there bosses ? Like how much further is this going to go ? And I do think this time around , and I'm going to get a lot of hate for this . I feel like Google really is putting in the effort here. I think the fact they spent nine months to ship this speaker after announcing it and ask I asked this question, why nine months? Because we were making sure it really worked well with Google Home Google Gemini for home. Like they've spent an awful lot of time re architecting the foundation of Google Home. And this is one of the reasons why I think so many people have struggled with Google Home in the past is it was basically the original smart speakers were like Chromecast software. It wasn't designed to be a smart home device . Apple's homepod, Amazon's Echoes, you know, those were designed in many ways for the smart home , Google's really weren't. And I think this speaker is the beginning of the hardware specifically designed for the smart home. So I'm excited to see where Google goes next. And I also I don't dislike the restraint. I'm not a huge fan of how many echoes there are out there and sort of the need feel like do I need to upgrade to get a better experience but But Google Home's current devices are very long in the tooth and in fact have now officially been discontinued. So at least the Nest Mini is no longer available. They're definitely shifting away from the Nest name So I think this is their last chance . Get it right now, Google. But from what I've seen and talking to people in the industry and people at Google, like there is a lot of momentum for them behind this because it's a place for Gemini and the whole company is Gemini now. This is You can argue this is an AI device as much as it is a smart home device . And in that sense, I have a lot of faith in Google's ability to care deeply about this thing for a very long time. Yeah. To that end, actually. Well, one thing on the hardware, before, I want to talk about Gemini for home for just a minute because I don't fully understand what it is, but I'm hoping you can explain it to you. But on the hardware front, I have realized in testing this thing that everybody's experimented with lots of different kinds of hardware, right? There was a time where people were doing sort of big high end like professional level smart speakers. We've seen the big tall ones. We've seen the lots of different shapes and sizes of all of these things. It does feel like this and I'm holding up the echo mini and the Google Home Speaker is the correct answer. Like as a, I think what we've discovered is most people don't want these to be like gigantic home theater systems. They just want them to be relatively small, sound relatively good and like sit on a table in your living room somewhere. Like if you're going to pick an answer, this feels like the right answer size. Do you agree with that? That's the echo dot just the echo dot The Nest Mini was the little nest . Yeah, yeah, the echo, I do. I think if you're a high end , if you want high end audio, you're not buying smart home speakers. You're going with the Sonos or the Denin or something even more expensive . But the way that these smart speakers work and this is one of the things that the new Google Home speaker does is you can pair them with your Google Home streamer or your Fire TV. So there is an element of added sound benefit that you're getting from these speakers. But generally, yeah, you're just using them primarily for that voice interface like setting the timers, asking for the weather or whatever Gemini or Alexa Plus can do for you . So I think one of the arguments that Google said why they created this shape was because people didn't like how big the Nest Audio was. It was hard to fit in spaces. And I actually had that issue too with the Nest Audio. So I can see that argument. And I also think the smaller ones, the really small ones, like the echo dot before this and the Nest Minis were too small, too tinny, didn't have a people have gotten used to decent sound now. We've found that spot and I don't think we're going to move from it for a while. Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think in terms of like can we get the sound to good enough, the home speaker, I think eas,ily clears that bar, which I find actually pretty exciting. Like as a sort of simple, like right now I have a sono speaker in our playroom that we just use to play toddler music all day. I would absolutely swap this thing into that spot and be very happy with the sound quality which I think is kind of all it needs to be. Yeah . And I've heard it's not as good technically a speaker as the audio, the Nest Audio , but I think you're right the differe,nce is probably legible for the type of device this is and what you're likely to use it for. Yeah, totally. Real quick on Gemini for home. I think Google has made a lot of noise about this big AI upgrade for smart home stuff, the replacing Google Assistant with Gemini, everything is LLM powered. We've also watched Amazon do this same thing, I would say to not always great effect. Like, yes, it's great that you can talk more naturally to these things. Yes, it's good that you can have sort of longer, more complicated conversations . On the other hand, it actually seems in many cases running these things through this more complicated AI technology makes it harder to just say turn on the lights and assume that the lights will turn on. You and I both have a lot of Gemini for home testing to do. Yeah. But I'm curious what you've seen sort of in this space in general with Alexa Plus and Gemini for home and all of this stuff like is the AI smart home control actually getting to the point where it can work ? No, not yet . And that's what I was afraid of . So this has been my biggest sort of frustration with the new LLM powered smart home assistance or smart assistance because I feel like to our point earlier this is Alexa Plus and Gemini is what the broader companies want and they're focused on the larger use cases, the more personalized assistant use cases, you know, being the news Siri , being part of your whole life, not just your home. And in my experience , that feels that the home side has been slightly there's less priority for the home side, more priority for ordering an Uber or buying getting me a handyman or telling me giving me a whole exposition on the state of the World Cup , you know, like giving that experience, which there's valuable experiences in there, but the core basic, I'm just going to be able to use my smart home better is still wonky. I can see that it's getting a little better. I mean, some of the best experiences I've had of being able to set up routines with voice , which you can do with Alexa Plus and being able to do multiple commands to control your devices, which you can do with both home assistants. But yeah, right now I feel like the focus for most of these companies is making the Gemini or the Alexa Plus better at the larger picture, not they're not smart home specialists anymore, which is what Google Assistant and the original Alexa really were. I don't think that means they never will be . I just feel like that part has been a slower boil. Something I'm excited about with Google Home is that they have added a lot more local control to the devices. It's still just specific model specific device types, so lights and plugs. That shift towards local , which is also powered by the matter support both platforms offer. That's going to present a much better smart home experience for your basic use cases. The big picture for both of these platforms is also the AI with the camera and the home security. And this is also something I think we'll see coming more to Apple when they launch if they launch their new Siri in the home is being able to query your speaker and sort of say when did you see the UPS guy? Those types of experiences, I think, are going to be the primary focus for the smart home, more so than just making sure your lights turn on fast. Yeah, it's an interesting it's an interesting piece of it because I think you're right that we are getting more complicated, more interesting possibilities out of the LLM powered stuff. Yeah , while running the risk of losing all of the stuff that you actually need to do all day . Yeah It's going to be interesting. And I think the idea of these things being primarily AI speakers with a sort of side of smart home is probably right. And I don't know if that's what I would like these things to be, but it does feel like if you sort of look at it as every company ships its org chart, like there's more AI in here than there is smart home. Very much for better and for worse. Yeah, yeah. And it's nice that Google are bringing along their smart home . I mean, I could have I felt like, you know, given their history, we could have totally expected to see them just be like, okay, we're going to just cut that off at the legs and start fresh , but they've put a lot of effort into bringing old devices and or bringing the whole ecosystem of how you used Google Assistant before into Gemini for home. It's been a bumpy ride though. I mean, I think it means that people that are using for Gemini for home today who have previously used Google Assistant are still finding things that they can't do . But talking to the Google Home folks, they are constantly trying to add these old features back into the new system , and hopefully they will work better once they're here. So here's hoping. And I just want you to know and I want everyone to know who's at home listening and watching that haven' It rolled my eyes any of the time Jen has said matters so far. I just want everyone to know that . Well, we have lots more Google Home Speaker stuff to do. You have some testing to do. I have some test ing to do. We may come back to this thing at some point in the near future because it's red and it's cool looking and I like it. But for now, let's get to some of our other questions. All right, Jenn, I have two questions for you . The first one is from Patrick . And it is a question that has made me feel a surprising amount of Felix. So Patrick says I own an Ecobeat, smart thermostat and I've owned it for a while now. At the time, I think it was one of the few home kid enabled brands or at least it was highly recommended for someone on the Apple ecosystem. I think it's one of those gadgets that are reliable so we don't get new ones every year, but also dot dot dot this thing hasn't changed at all since I bought it years ago. No new features or innovation, not even AI . Nobody has tried selling me an AI enabled smart thermostat yet. Not complaining, just surprise. Even my dishwasher's default cycle is AI wash . Do you see why this made me feel ing stupid? I am so with Patrick on this emotional roller coaster . Yeah . But I guess there's sort of two parts of this that I'm curious for your thoughts about. One is, are we due for the AI if every single product that A these companies want to sell you and B, they want to update that are already in your house. Yes . Again, at this conference I was just at Unify, which is the conference from Connectivity Standards Alli the people behind Matter , the originator of the term Internet of Things was talking . And he was railing against smart appliances. He's like, We do not need smart appliances . We do not need a smart fridge. We do not need a smart dishwasher. He was saying we need to put AI creating much more valuable experiences because he doesn't see any value in the current experiences. But when it comes to thermostats, I think the specific argument here is actually these were already using a form of AI. True. They were all the way back to the nest. It is like fundamentally AI technology. Exactly. It was one of the earliest machine learning devices we put in our homes . That was and the ECAB also not quite as learning as the Nest, but it used machine learning to kind of optimize your comfort and energy savings was kind of their line because it was observing your behavior, detecting patterns, you know, it was using something that your bog standard thermostat did not . And that I think that's probably why you feel like you haven't seen people touting AI as a feature here because the core use case of the type of intelligence we're talking about for bringing into the home is to sort of manage it automatically for you without you having to input. And that's really what the sort of selling point of these thermostats has been for the decade that they've been around. They were ahead of the game to be fair. They have had a lot of under the hood kind of upgrades and improvements, but the newer models have added a lot more whizbang features. And that's what I think we're starting to see in the smart home is bringing in more use cases for your devices and also connecting into the rest of your home . The AI powered element, I think we'll start to see more of. Like we mentioned with the speakers, there's this sort of push from platforms to integrate their Demoni and their Alexa Plus into these devices more so that you can do more with them in your home or ultimately have your home do more for you without you having to do any input. Because that was one of the arguments against these devices, the Nest and the ECB early on is they would just go off and do their own thing. And you're like, No, I don't want to be that cool. Better answer for worse . Yeah. So I think it's an interesting space to watch. I mean, there's a lot of new smart thermostats that have come out recently that have one interesting area is Apple's new adaptive temperature feature, which basically takes what both the Nest and the Ecobee made their name on that automatically adapting to your habits and use and makes it available to any thermostat that works with Apple Home . So you have to adopt their API, their adaptive temperature system , but you can they can do everything like switch modes, detect occupancy, determine when you're coming and going, which is what these other thermostats all did. So we're sort of seeing a democratization, I suppose, of these smart features , because both the Nest and the EcoBe are expensive. You can now buy a smart thermostat for one hundred and fifty dollars . And I think we'll start to see only a couple work with Apple right now, the adaptive features, but I think we'll start to see more of those , especially with because it's all through matter. So we're starting to see, again, to get less expensive to get these smarter features . And I like his point that we don't upgrade our thermostats very often. So this is the other thing I was going to ask you about, which is, I think what is what is a reasonable set of expectations to have for something like a smart thermostat that I plug into my wall and ideally I would like to have it there until I die, right? Like I don't no one has ever been excited about upgrading their thermostat. It's a thing you do when you have to do it. Yeah. And so I think I get you do. This is why this is why you're here, Jen. This is why we love you. But I think on the one hand , one of the cool things about having these things be more technologically advanced is that they can get new features. On the other hand, what if I hate those features? Yeah. And I think especially now people are reckoning with this with AI in a very real way of like, actually I don't want you to stick your weird AI nonsense into my thermostat. Yeah , but I'm sort of captive because literally the thing is in my wall. Yeah. How do you think through that trade off right now ? So this is a sort of concern people have had about appliances in general, not just around smart , just as they get more technologically advanced, they last less time. Like people talk about their grandmother's washing machine that goes for twenty years, whereas now most of them you're lucky if you get your washing machine to last a decade . And that's the trade off though is that these washing machines can do so much more than your grandma's in theory, depending on what you're looking for from your washing machine . But you know, basically just clothes washing ideally. Use less water, use less energy being able to schedule them, being able to program, I can program a dog bed mode into my washing machine . You know, there are benefits. So that's the trade off . I think for a device like a thermostat, the only real reason to , I mean, Nest has told us with theirs, ten years is basically what you can expect, right? Because they end of life original Mest thermostat . I think it was almost thirteen years. Although you can still use it and this is a key part for any , we've talked about this before, but it's worth repeating any smart appliance you buy in your home, you want to make sure that the basic functions will continue even once you have disconnected it from the internet because you need to disconnect it from the internet once it gets to the point where it's not getting software update so it doesn't become part of a giant DOS attack. So you definitely but as long as those devices can still work the way they were intended to as a basic function, which the Nests can, even though Nest is now discontinued sport, there is, you know, that's the trade off. Look for that and then local control . To your main point about the AI, if you don't want some of these features that your either your thermostat company or your smart home platform is pushing on you or eventually maybe your energy platform. If you don't want those features, you need to look for a device that's going to you're going to still be able to control locally. And this is where Matter comes in because it will allow once a platform takes away support, the device should still be able to work on your local network. So it's hard to know for sure, though unt,il we actually see this happen . This is all somewhat theoretical . But yeah, that's what I would definitely advise. A device that can work locally, can also run locally if you still want some of the smart features And then you can kind of take or leave hopefully if people are pushing AI features at you. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, last question , which I'm including partly because it's a good question and partly because this is just a thing you and I can't stop talking about here. Let me just play this question for you . Hello, this is Reese again. I'm at the one hour twenty minute mark of the cast on Friday june nineteenth And I found myself yelling at the screen because the sleeping giant in smart home is Ikea . They have the most to gain from matter and they need to be the one dragging this one because they sell the cheap stuff that everyone's buying , but their smart home ecosystem in terms of their hub is awful . And so they need all of their stuff to work properly with Google, Alex, et cetera, and aren't going to put the engineering resources into making that happen the way Hugh has. Hugh was early enough to wear everything had to survive it to be considered a smart home , but IKEA is coming in and is easily the giant in the smart home space is looming over it. And I think that they have the most to gain from matter. All right, there you go. Reece gets it, Jen. I was there with you, Reese. I was shouting at them at the same time . Maybe not about IKEA specifically, but yes . So again, just spent a whole week talking to companies about the value of matter in the smart home. And I agree with you. Companies like Ikea are the ones that are going to benefit from matter because its core promise is basic inter oper ability for both the manufacturer and the user. So a company like IKEA that makes furniture doesn't have to worry about developing separate routes to work with Apple and work with Alexa and spending the resource engineering resources on that, they can just use one platform or one standard matter and it should work, should work with everyone . And I think that's really the value proposition of matter for manufacturers in general. One thing I've been surprised about though is we haven't seen more companies taking up this opportunity because right now , most matter products come from the companies that were already in the space. And the point about Phillips Hugh that you made, David is that they already worked with all these platforms. So what's the benefit now of switching to matter for them . And I actually spoke with the CTO of Hugh at this event. And for them, the real benefit here is that they can now build more experiences on top of that connectivity layer and not have to spend all their time troubleshooting wackamole with five different platforms. So it kind of helps them stay relevant in the ecosy in the smart home space as these mid tier value brands like IKEA and ICARA start coming in and potentially eating their lunch , which is what we're starting to see, and this is where matter is great for the user is that we're seeing less expensive products come into the market because these companies haven't had to invest a ridiculous amount of time and money working with everyone. What I'd like to see is more non smart home companies, more IKEAs coming in coming in and making interesting products that work in our smart homes that they don't have to sort of deal with just the connectivity. They can come up with really good and useful features for us in our homes. We're starting to see it from some of the lock manufacturers like Schlegg and QuickSet. They're adopting this the UWB unlocking, which is really interesting. And that would have not been possible before open standards . This is the hands free walking in, having your door open with just using your phone in your pocket. Smart appliance makers, we talked about, washing machines, fridges again, they need to come up with the value add like, okay, we're going to connect this device, but it's not just about the fact that it's connected. It's about what it can do for you. And that's what I'm hoping to see more of . And I've been disappointed we haven't seen more of that to date. And I think that's largely to do with the rollout of matter. You know, it's taken a while . There have been some bumps in the road. And I think we 've really keeping a close eye on whether we're going to really see outside of the smart home adoption because that's when it reaches that kind of critical mass and hopefully becomes a more of a mainstream solution for people because today it's still niche . And the people that are really benefiting from matter today are actually the semiconductor makers like NXP, Nordic, SILB. Well, there's the matter story we were looking for, Jen Semiconductor companies . They're the ones that are really beneficing at this stage because everyone's, you know, there's tri radio chips. Everyone's got their thread and their Wi and their bluetooths . But in many ways, that's good for the consumer, but just not for a while . Because these once these new chips are in these devices , you'll be able to use any platform you like. That's like ultimately gonna be I know it's the long game though. It's great for the consumer, but not for a while the whole story of matter Some day it's gonna be so dope matter. Like it's great I agree with all of that. And I also think that if Ikea can be the one to like prove the theory in a real way, it's why you and I spent a whole episode talking about the buttons, right? Like just the idea of IKEA being like, hey, this thing cost four dollars and it works. Yeah . Is so powerful that it was so frustrating to see it kind of fall on its face in the way that it has. Yeah. But to IKEA's credit, I think that stuff has gotten meaningfully better even since then and will continue to do so. So I'm actually very optimistic about IKEA's ability to like do the thing Rh isys describing and kind of drag everybody along. And they are. And in fact, I did talk to someone from one of the major ecosystems at this panel conference who was in charge of bringing everyone together to fix the IKEA problems. They had like an emergency summit for like a week with all the major platforms. Oh wow. And we're like, We're gonna fix this. Now, that's like unprecedented , you know, and that's for a four dollar button. For a four dollar button. That gives me a lot of hope for the standard because my biggest concern when it first launched was, you know, okay, we've got Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon. Yeah, we're all working together. Come by , this is going to be great. But you know, two, three years down the line, are they all going to be like fighting at dawn with each other to like get off my turf. This is my, this is my walled garden. And honestly, I don't think that's happened. I think the platforms have been somewhat slow to adopt support. That's been a frustration, but it does seem like they are still all working together to because success for Mata should equal success for them . That's it's still a little up in the air. Their partners are people like Ikea, and they want those partners to be successful so that they will continue to support their smart home ambitions. So it's a bit of a sort of flywheel , but I feel like that concern I had early on that the sort of the alliance would crumble after a few years . So far, I haven't seen the sign of that. In fact, I've seen the opposite. They really all do seem to be working together. So that is good for the consumer. That is good. Just not for a while. I'll take it . All right, Jennifer, that's what I've been told. This is all fair hard. For sure. And they continue, like they continue to want the right things. So I am continually encouraged by the direction of this, if not the speed of it. And AI, I think, is actually helping in that respect, even though it's not helping necessarily on a daily basis for us, but it's keeping these platforms interested in this in the sp smart home ace , where prior, as we had seen, it seemed like they were losing interest , but now they've got a real use case, value prop for, and I wrote about this on the verge. So there's a real value proposition for these companies to get AI into your home through the smart home . So whether you would welcome it in or not, though, that's up to you . Very, very true. All right, Jen, thanks for being here. Good to see you. Good to see you. All right, that's it for the show. Thanks to Jen for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening and sending us questions. And keep sending us more questions. Jen has just all kinds of smart home thoughts and likes coming on the show to yell at me about how great matter is. So please keep giving her reasons to do so. Call the hotline eight six verge one, send us an email vers atovir. com. We absolutely love hearing from you. And as always, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're up to here is go to the V erge. com slash subscribe and subscribe to the Verge. That's how you get all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. That's how you get all of our exclusive newsletters, all of our coverage of the weird things that matter is and isn't doing and everything else at the Verge com. slash subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Cahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larch, and Aaron Lacasio. We'll see you tomorrow, rock 'n' roll