Last year, Google began rolling out support for matter on your smart home devices. But Amazon wasn’t ready to turn the feature on across its range of smart device hardware (such as smartphones). amazon-echo). However, this is changing, since Amazon is implementing support for the aforementioned standard in some of its models that have been on the market for a while.
The well-known online store has announced a new improvement for a good number of devices that include the Alexa voice assistant. Thus, the firm will have in the market that over 100 million Echo smart speakers with support for Matter. This demonstrates the implication that the company has regarding using a development that has the objective that accessories of different brands (we always talk about those considered intelligent), can interact with each other -at least in the basic functions-.
Advances even in configuration
Previously, to set up Matter devices with Amazon Alexa, it was necessary to do it through an Android phone and could only be done over WiFi. Now, things have changed, which is because the North American company is rolling out a big update that will not only allow you to configure devices with an iOS phone, but also devices that work with Thread technology.
As for Amazon’s own products, the company said in a blog post: “We have enabled the update of Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot 2nd generation devices as Matter controllers, in addition to Echo (4th generation) as a Thread router. That means Echo (4th Gen) customers can now expand their smart homes with Matter Thread-enabled devices in addition to Matter-enabled Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Mesh, and Wi-Fi devices.”
Increasing the compatibility of the Echo
The first thing to know is that the update reaches the product ranges Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Plus. Plus, all of that means you’ll be able to use a wider range of devices within the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, such as Eve smart plugs – which use Thread instead of WiFi to connect. Besides, you will not depend on having an Internet connection so that they can communicate with each other.
While there are still improvements to be made, such as Alexa still supporting Thread bridging, it’s very clear that full support for all types of connectivity is in the works and will arrive shortly. Therefore, it seems that Matter is an important bet for Amazon and, of course, for its entire Echo range.
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