I love my cute lil’ Nest Thermostat — it makes my home feel like a spaceship. But there’s one thing that’s stopped me from feeling total futuristic vibes: its integration with other voice-activated assistants.
Yeah, the Nest works wonderfully with Google Home, but Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa? You’d have more luck speaking to a potato.
But this might change very soon. In a blog post published this week, Google announced that it’s bringing Matter to Nest and Android.
So, what is Matter? Basically, it’s an open standard that wants to make every bit of smart home tech work with whatever voice assistant you want. A terrible name? Definitely. But a brilliant idea? You betcha.
What this means is when Apple and Amazon integrate Matter into their own smart home services, you’ll be able to use Siri or Alexa to control the Nest Thermostat. Unfortunately, this will only work on the base model, not the Nest Learning Thermostat. Hopefully, this will arrive in time.
Anyway, the news goes deeper than just this. The update means that Google Home will soon be able to control any Matter-enabled devices. Effectively, the number of products you can use with Google Home is set to explode. In a nice way.
This Matter roll-out will also reach Android phones. For the user, this will make controlling smart home gadgets on your mobile far easier.
Of course, this isn’t a done deal yet. Firstly, Google hasn’t announced when it’s going to release this update. I assume it’s not going to take years, but it could be several months until all these features are released globally.
Secondly, the most interesting outcome of Matter’s adoption is smart home products working with any voice activated assistant. For this to actually work well, Apple and Amazon need to join the party too.
This will happen, but we don’t know when. And at least this news from Google is a real first step in letting me control my spaceship thermostat with my assistant of choice. To the Star War please, Captain Picard.
