The Vergecast Matter Holiday Spec-tacular

26:46And if only Lutron could have brought its wireless protocol instead of Thread. I mean, Thread has its use cases in some areas. Lighting has been one area that they've tried to shoehorn lighting into Thread and it just doesn't seem to be working very well. and we've been running into a lot of issues, Nanoleaf and Nicarra. Nanoleaf, which was all in on Thread, has really backpedaled and has created its own protocol. Perfect. Perfect. So, yeah, there have been issues with Thread. I mean, Thread was supposed to – so, matter doesn't have to work on Thread, just to make that clear. You can have matter without Thread.

27:25You can have matter over Wi-Fi. And in theory, matter could work over other protocols too. It just hasn't – that hasn't happened yet. But we've got matter of you've got but thread also needs a software layer. It needs an application layer. So thread has to have matter or it can have HomeKit or it could have another application layer, which is, you know, so that's getting sort of into the speccy details. But you you can have matter without thread. Thread was developed specifically to be an IoT protocol and for the smart home, which is why a lot of people put a lot of faith into it, thinking it's going to solve a lot of these problems that we've shoehorned other protocols into, like Bluetooth.

28:03There are lots of Bluetooth mesh smart lights out there. I still see companies launching Bluetooth mesh smart lights, and I'm like, why are you doing this? um but that and thread is supposed to you know it's low power low bandwidth mesh networking it has all of these what sound like great um attributes for a smart home uh but it's it the launch with matter i think and into such a small protocol into such a big space has has caused some significant problems. And Thread released its 1.4 spec this year, which was basically, we've seen how Thread's working in the real world, and now here's everything we're going to fix to make it work properly.

28:50And people are interested in Thread. I get comments all the time on my articles like, why isn't this work with Thread? Why are there so few Thread devices? I want Thread in my home. It's reliable. It works well. But yeah, the two together have have caused a lot of, it's two standards working from two with, and I hear this a lot from the CSA, you know, we're a member driven organization. Lots of us are talking to create this. So there's no one person kind of leading it. And the thread group's the same. I mean, Apple, Google, Samsung, they're all part of the thread group as well. Apple and Google are all in on thread though.

29:26And I think that's why we're seeing so much momentum or so much push for thread, but you're not seeing it so much from the other platforms. I mean, they're long for the ride but Apple and Google are the ones that are really pushing it. And Apple can't just do the thing it usually does which is like, here's the new MacBook. It has no radios except for a thread radio. Right. That's how Apple drives a dot. I think you would like to do that. They would. There's random thread radios on the new phones and no one knows why. They're doing kind of the move they usually do but with USB-C or whatever, they were just like yeah we took everything else away like would you like to use your macbook welcome to dongle town like you they can't do that with thread in the same way and it feels like that's because no one can just make the push in that way it's going very slowly what's the line a camel is just a horse designed by committee right like it feels like this is this is the camel of the smart home it does feel like every holiday spectacular episode just ends with the the slow somewhat depressing reveal that it's just politics there's a lot of politics in this one how does the standard work and it's like people yell at each other until they die well on that holiday you know uh jen give us give us a big overall matter grade and then we're gonna take a break and play some games what do you think matters 2024 24.

30:51Wow. Wow. I'm going to have to go with a D. Present. Present. Yeah. It showed up. It showed up. It made some effort. Okay. It got a few things right, but it's still got a lot of room for improvement. I think the D is right because it's like the grade you give to the kid who's not doing great, but you kind of don't want them to be your problem anymore. So you just sort of pass them on to the next year. Wow. I feel like I've learned so much about both of your school. I'm not saying I was that kid. I'm just saying people in history have been that kid. That they're just like, go be somebody else's problem.

31:27And it feels like that's where we are with matter. It's like it's moving on. There's a lot of potential. I know you would really love this word. But there really is. I mean, the foundation is there. There's just a lot of building work that still needs to be done. But the vibes seem good. The people who need to think matter is going to work still think matter is going to work. Oh, yeah. I need to say you are completely wrong from your predictions. Sorry, I should have started. I hope I'm wrong. To be clear. What was your prediction? That matter would just go away? That everybody's going to give up on matter.

32:00Give up on matter by the end of 2025. And that's not going to happen. Yeah. It's here to stay. And it's going to get, you know, it's just how long is it going to take for it to get to the point where it's achieving everything it really set out to do. and I think getting there is the hard part. There's the politics and the manufacturers. There's so many people involved, so many companies involved that, you know, it's the momentum needs to keep going and you need to keep like cracking the whip at these companies because they're like, oh, this, because it is a good idea. I mean, it is going to help make the smart home better.

32:36But as you say, Nilay, some of these companies don't feel like there's an incentive. So we need to, you know, they need to know that there's an incentive, which is people want to use these devices and they want them to work well in their home. And the companies need to step up and make that happen. There you go. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and play some games and see how well we actually understand any of this stuff. Oh, my God. We'll be right back.

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36:08All right, we're back. Liam James, our producer and MC and game show host is here. Liam, hi. Hey, everybody. It's that time. It's our annual tradition to play some games around the spec that we've picked out. And also, it just kind of gives me a chance as your producer to play evil games with you and make you look silly in front of everyone. So really, this is my favorite time of year. You should also play these games with your family, by the way. Oh, yeah. Everybody told me last year that USB-C bingo was a big hit all around the tree. People loved it. I love that. Yeah. Okay, great. We're going to start with the match game.

36:45Oh, God. Please pull out your match game cards. This, if we give this to people to print out and they hand this out to their family. We will be doing the CSA a big favor in educating the public. If you'd like your family to not want to speak to you for several days, please suggest playing this game. Okay, let me tell you how it goes. On the left of your player card, you have seven different matter-specific things. I'm just going to be as vague as I can. And on the right, you have the descriptions, definitions really, of those seven things. What each of you need to do is draw lines from the items listed on the left to the definitions on the right.

37:30We will give you two minutes to complete that. Some of these words are obviously fake. Like, I don't think matter fabric is a real word. Consumer denied that some of these are fake. Let me read them out for the audience. So we've got matter device, smart home hub, matter administrator, matter fabric, matter controller. thread border router and matter bridge. And you're telling me that these are all different things. These are all different things. I would have told you three of these are synonyms. These items and the definitions were pulled from the CSA website. So, right from the source. Alright, I'll start your two minute timer now.

38:13Can these things be defined as themselves? There's some real tautologies here I would point out. Alright, I'm done. It's very messy looking though Okay I think I can't say that This is easy to follow Mine is unhinged I don't know why I chose curving lines Instead of straight lines Curving lines Yeah mine looks very I should have just written the words next to each other I know I think that's what I See what I'm saying here This is not normal Oh yeah you got a little swoopy thing going on I'm into that Okay, is everybody done? Yes. As done as we're going to be. Okay. I think the way we should do this is I'm going to go to each one of the seven, and I'll go to each one of you, and you tell me what you pick.

39:02Honor system, Jen, no cheating. Well, I'm not going to tell you who is right until you each answer. Okay, Matter Device. Nilai, what did you pick for Matter Device is the definition. A Matter Device is a smart home hardware product that supports Matter. And I just want to be clear. These definitions are from the CSA, correct? Yes. The CSA has defined a lot of things as themselves. Like the tautological definitions here are out of control. A Matter device is a smart home product that supports Matter. That's it. So it can be connected to and controlled by a Matter controller. Okay, great. Jen, what did you choose?

39:41The same one. The same one. Okay. And David? I said the same thing. a smart home hardware product that supports matter so that it can be connected to and controlled by a matter controller. Right. So if it's matter, it does matter. And so it matters. And then the devious thing, the CSA here, is they lull you into a false sense of security by defining everything as itself. A matter device is a matter device. And then they're like, and here's some other bullshit.

40:07You are all correct. You each get three points for the correct answer. Okay, moving on. Smart Home Hub. Nilay, what did you choose for that one? A Smart Home Hub is typically a connection point in the home for multiple Smart Home devices, usually specific to the vendor that has provided it, which I disagree with, but that's what I picked. Yeah, it's not a great description, actually. You can tell the CSA has really shaded it. Yeah. To be like, these suck, you should use Matter. Because it's not typically specific to a vendor. Did you go with that same answer? I did, yes, sorry. And David? I went with the same thing.

40:46I picked something else until the very last second and then switched to this one. Okay. Tell me what the answer is you chose again, Neelai. Typically a connection point in the home for multiple smart home devices. Yeah, I missed the word typically. That is correct. You all got it right. Wow. I was not expecting this. Oh, don't worry. The dumb ones are coming. Okay. All right. Our next one is Matter Administrator. Neelai, which one did you pick for that? An entity that can control matter devices the user has connected. Functionality can be built into many types of hardware devices like phones, always powered smart home hubs that provide local and remote control, smart switches, buttons, or even mobile apps.

41:27I challenge the listener to distinguish between it can be a phone or an app on your phone. What if your whole phone was a light switch? Think about that. I have one phone for every app. This is good. This is we disagree for the first time. I had something else for this one. Oh, that's, I had that one. That's the one you chose as well? Yes. Okay. And David, which one did you pick? I said a device or application that creates, maintains, and manages security and privileges for all device on the Fabric. Okay. Which, by the way, that definition, it sounds like it came directly out of Dune. Welcome to the Fabric.

42:04We manage the Fabric. All right. Our scores are finally diverging on that round. And Eli and Jen, I'm sorry to tell you, you got that one wrong. David was correct. No. No. Oh, no. You got them the wrong way around. This is when it begins to fall apart. Yes. All right. Because matter controllers are the ones that manage the security. I'm not going to lie. As soon as Jen disagreed with me, I instantly put an X next to my thing. I was like, there's no chance. You should have been. You need to double check this one, Liam. Okay. We will have our judges. But you're right. Matter admins and matter controllers are very, very, very, very, very close together.

42:42I'm hearing so many excuses now. No, but matter, this is what a fabric. A matter administrator is just a bureaucrat in the government. And a matter controller controls the spice. Please, my father was a matter. Do you understand? Okay, moving on. Matter fabric. Neelai, which one did you pick for matter fabric? Who knows? this is the one that I think the CSA is trolling us by defining the thing as itself. So a matter of fact matter devices are connected together on a virtual network within a home called a matter fabric, a virtual private network over which matter devices, admins and controllers communicate with each other.

43:25Yeah. Liam, I think you straight up put the answer. Yeah. As soon as I saw that, this is a, sorry, it's a host error. It's like when Jen Jennings just says the name of the thing when he's giving the clue on Jeopardy. I apologize to the audience. Did we all get that one right? Did everyone get that one right? We all got that one right. All right, that was a freebie. Fabulous. Three points for all. I just want to point out, I'm crushing it right now. My confidence is through the roof. It's all the hat. It's the hat. It's all the hat. It's bringing you good vibes. All right, Matter Controller. Eli, which one did you choose for Matter Controller?

44:00Why do I always go first? I chose... Because it's easier for me to score. I see. Matter controller is a device or application that creates, maintains, and manages security and privileges for all devices on the fabric. Wrong. Which I believe is what Jen would have picked. Yeah, that's what I meant with. Because we are correct. David, what did you pick? An entity that can control matter devices the user has connected. Functionality can be built into many types of hardware devices like phones, always-powered smart hubs that provide local and remote control, smart switches and buttons, or even mobile apps.

44:32Just for the listener, right? Take this out of the weird bureaucracy of a bunch of nerds designing a smart home standard and take this again into your favorite sci-fi fantasy world. Dune, for example, which I keep referencing. Who has the higher rank in Dune? The administrator or the controller? See what I'm saying? Makes sense to me. It's interesting. I do feel like the administrator is the one who gets to press all the buttons, though. The controller stands behind their chair and yells things, but the administrator is the one who's getting stuff done. Yeah, the controller is obviously Palpatine.

45:05Yes, correct. But like, does it somehow have any real power? Think about that. Oh, yeah. You know what? The difference here, and I didn't actually read this properly, is that it says device or application, whereas for the matter administrator, it says an entity. So a matter controller. Like a ghost? An entity is definitely above a controller and an administrator. Yeah. The matter entity is what's truly in charge here. So the administrator... The floating spirit of matter. This is, although it does say, actually, if you see at the bottom of that one, an entity, it does say, or even mobile apps.

45:45So it's also applications and apps. Both of these definitions are just like, they do some stuff, whatever we want. I don't know. They're basically the same thing, which they are essentially the same thing. It's just a controller needs to be a physical device. No, that's not true. I know. Well, so they originally said that apps could be controllers, but that has actually changed. And apps can't be controllers on their own. They can only be administrators. So these are actually out of date. And the CSA's website. You're getting away with so much because you have that accent. And I want you to know.

46:24But yeah, if you read both of these descriptions are exactly the same. Yes.

46:33story of matter it's a it's a thing for matter devices is the answer to every single one but i'm just so excited that the man who said matter is not going to exist in a year is the one that's going to win the quiz i'm just saying right now our disagreement does not it just the root of this disagreement is whether you think an administrator is a higher rank than a controller That's what it is, right? A controller is just like, you can turn the lights on and off. An administrator is, you can kick people out of the fabric. Neelai, I'm the entity now. Holy ghost. It's Christmas. All right, let's keep going.

47:13Yeah, well, for the purposes of scoring, I want to make it official that Dave got that one right. Neelai, Jen, I'm sorry. But I'm just pointing out that the Connectivity Standards Association got it wrong. This is how Nilay got hundreds on his tests, by the way. Just start arguing. We've got two more. Two was wrong. We've got two more. The next one, our favorite, the thread border router. Nilay, which one did you choose for that? Another one that appeared to be a tautological definition. A thread border router enables thread devices to connect to the local network so they're able to communicate with other IP-based devices built on technology such as Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

47:54Yes. What'd you pick? That one. Same one, David? Yes. This was the closest I came to getting one wrong because I'm a genius. And again, there are going to be two in a row that sound very much exactly the same, but I said the same thing. Okay, great. You all got it correct. Three points for everyone. Last one, MatterBridge. MatterBridge translates from one protocol to another, allowing non-Matter smart home devices, such as those using Zigbee or Z-Wave, to connect to what else? A MatterFabric. Fabric. And that was all that's left. Yeah, it was. Got that all right. This holiday season, connect to the fabric.

48:33Connect to the fabric. Go home to your families. Connect to the fabric. All right. We're all one on the fabric. I just, this is what a perfect score looks like. Look at that. Yeah. We're going to appeal to the higher power, Eli. To the entity. To the entity. I will get the CSA to fix their website. Yeah. That's how you really win the test. You're like, I changed the book. You instantly win if you can change. But you have to do it before this episode publishes. Those are the rules. Okay. Look, I can see the argument for administrator outranking controller, but I'm just saying in the Dune universe, the controller, that's like a heavy word.

49:15Administrator is never a heavy word. It just is. You're like, I'm an administrator. It's like, great. Get out of here, gray suit. I'm not talking to you. The border routers are just those weird planes that just take people around. That's a border router. It doesn't do anything. It just kind of crashes occasionally. The drones. The drones over New Jersey are border routers. Exactly. I think we can all agree what we learned from this game is that matter is way more complicated than it might seem. The spice must flow. The spice must flow. All right. We're going to move on to our second and final game.

49:50But before we do, I want to just quickly let our fans know what the scores are thus far. David is dominant. Nilay Patel has 12 points so far, as does Jen Tui. And David is leading the pack right now with 18 points. I will say, just very quickly, having looked at the next game, this is still up in the air. David's lead is not safe. I also want to make it clear that I know very little about Dune. I watched both of those movies. I slept through the first one. The second one was better. Never read the books. Please do not quibble with me about Dune. It's very important to me. Quibble with the CSA.

50:29But only on Dune-related grounds. Send them notes about Dune. Yeah. Okay, we're going to do Matter Mad Libs. If you're not familiar with Mad Libs, Mad Libs is a pre-written sentence with a bunch of blanks in it and a bunch of choices for those blanks for you to fill in to make the sentence complete and make sense. So I'm going to read out the sentence and the word choices, and we'll give you two minutes to fill them in just like last time. No looking while he reads it. No starting early. Formally known as Blank, Blank is a unified connectivity standard developed by the Blank. The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices, regardless of brand or platform.

51:11It works through Blank, Blank, and Blank, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Matter's key advantage is that it uses a standardized blank. Matter lets you blank and use its devices across blank for more choice and control so you don't end up stuck on one platform. Your word choices are ecosystem or ecosystems, Bluetooth, Matter, IP protocol, Wi-Fi, chip, thread, CSA, and pair. Matter lets you blank should be the official tagline of the CSA. All right, we starting. Yeah, real Vergecast nerds know the first one because Dieter thought it was very funny. I have a question.

51:54It works through blank, blank, and blank. Does the order matter? No. I do have a correction for that one too for you. It's so funny. I wanted to run these by you, but then I was like, but I need her to play the game. That wouldn't be fair. Which word am I missing? I'm not super confident. Okay, I'm ready. Okay, it's looking like everyone is done. Let's reveal our answers. I'm going to go one at a time, slightly different order. Let's start with you, Jen, if you could read out the sentence you completed. Okay. Formerly known as CHIP, MATA is a unified connectivity standard developed by the CSA.

52:38The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices, regardless of the brand or platform. It works through Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. MATA's key advantage is that it uses a standardized IP protocol. MATA lets you pair and use its devices across ecosystems for more choice and control, so you don't end up stuck on one platform. Nailed it. All right. I can't tell you what you got yet. Next, we'll have David. Okay, now nervous. Yes. Formerly known as CHIP, Matter is a unified connectivity standard developed by the CSA.

53:19The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication. By the way, you should have made all those blanks and just made us fill them in. Reliable, secure, and seamless, I legitimately think we all might have gotten with no prompting. It's just the most tech companies speak of all time. Anyway, the protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices, regardless of the brand or platform. It works through thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Matter's key advantage is that it uses a standardized ecosystem, which I think is wrong.

53:48Jen sounded right. Matter lets you pair and use its devices across IP protocol, which also sounds wrong. I think Jen is right, for more choice and control so you don't end up stuck on one platform. Okay. And Neelai, what's yours? I was also correct, and I had the exact same answers as Jen. Well, that worked out great for me last time. So formally known as chip matters, unified connectivity standard developed by the CSA, blah, blah, blah. Other sense. It works through thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. So it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Key advantage is use a standardized IP protocol that lets you pair and use its devices across ecosystems for more choice and control.

54:24So you don't end up stuck on one platform and you can please the controller. Did we all write thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth in that order? Yes, because I think we all immediately thought of thread first. Just apropos of nothing, that's kind of wild. And then three blanks, three obvious answers, we wrote them all the same. We know it's thread. We're like, well, Wi-Fi's there. And they're like, fucking, is it Bluetooth? Bluetooth is not a protocol of matter. It's only an onboarding protocol. The other one is Ethernet. Liam, I want to, for the listener, Liam has had no response to this information.

54:52Liam's not listening. I've never seen anyone, anyone just like nothing. Like the most nothing just happened. Jen's over here angling for extra credit. Extra credit. Extra credit. I've got to be David. I've never seen anyone react less to anything than Liam just react to that. Sorry. I was scoring. I was scoring. No, that's not happening. That didn't happen. Nope. Nope. I mean, to be honest with you, that is mostly how I deal with you in day to day. It's just like nothing will happen. It's an effective strategy. All right. listeners our uh winner of this round is jen and eli who got every answer correct however david got a little messed up there in the end yeah uh he flipped ecosystem and ip protocol you know sometimes you say something out loud and you're like that wasn't it yeah so like it was yeah uses a standardized ecosystem is just like not that's not it guys i hear you you know i hear you confuse ecosystem and IP protocol.

55:53I mean, if I had a nickel, man. Day to day, you're in the verge. Hang on, let me send you that over ecosystem. It's like it happens constantly. The last protocol, though, is Ethernet. Bluetooth is just an onboarding protocol, man. Which I said first, if you guys remember. I was the first one to bring that up.

56:15So I had not planned for this, and I should have. Did we die? We have a tie. A three-way tie. Wow. So you're all winners with 39 points. First one to get away from the desk and return with a matter device wins. Jen could do it without. That's my phone. My phone, which is technically a matter controller. Jen already has two. You have a lot. Jen has two. Wait, okay, you showed up with a smart mop? you don't even get up alright Jen wins Jen wins I thought I was being so smart with the phone thing and she showed up with the smart yeah Nila's like I've subverted the system and Jen's like I have all the devices I have them all Jen probably has an example of all seven of the items from the match game on her desk right now so there you go well thank you for joining us for another fun round of games.

57:21Jen, you are our winner this year. I'm not sure what that means yet, but we'll just do something special. It means she's the new controller. Jen is the entity now. I know, I'm the admin. Burge Cast Controller. What am I? Jen runs the fabric now. I'm the fabric master. I'm the fabric master. That is it. There it is. Done. Tell the CSA. It's done. It's been decided. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk with Paulus from Home Assistant about the future of all of this. We'll be right back. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?

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1:00:20All right, we're back. We have a guest. Paul Schautzen is here. Hello. Welcome. Hey, how's it going? Can we talk about your sweater just for a second? This is really good audio, I'm sure. But this is the rare episode that I'm perfectly happy talking about visual things. Can you just describe your Christmas sweater just very quickly? Yeah, so I'm wearing the GitHub Christmas sweater. So it has like big GitHub letters on it. It's red, black, and green. and then all the different icons that you normally see when you're working on GitHub, they're like spread out over the sleeves and the chest and the shoulders.

1:00:49It's good stuff. It's very good. So we ask you... It's a serious smart home nudge. It really is. It is truly like, it is both very on brand and very good. I'm very happy to have it. So can you just describe what you do a little bit? We asked you to come on here because you work on and created Home Assistant and we're going to talk about Matter and all this stuff, But your sort of purview and job title has actually changed a bit recently. So can you just sort of describe the shape of that for us? Yeah, right. So I'm the president of the Open Home Foundation. This is a relatively new foundation.

1:01:22We started in April. It's now the owner of the Home Assistant open source project. It's the owner of the ESP Home open source project. And a bunch of other open source projects that are kind of the other two are built upon. Our goal is to really build a smart home, build around privacy, choice, and sustainability. So we're doing that by building technology. So in a way how Mozilla builds Firefox, we are building Home Assistant, ESP Home. We are, just by existing, we are influencing and steering the IoT market. I feel like Google, the Apples, you see that they look at us, we talk to them, we know that they know what we are doing, and they kind of take that into consideration or they learn from that.

1:02:04Their product managers will talk to people in our community. We are maybe not the biggest smart home platform out there. we are the biggest open source project in the world and also the biggest open source smart home platform. But we have a lot of influence in the market that way. You're definitely the biggest super nerdy smart home system, right? I think that's a fair place to say. Okay. We actually tell people like everybody, we're never anyone's first smart home platform. Everybody starts with Google and Amazon or Apple smart home. And then when they outgrow it for whatever reasons, privacy, more integrations, they want history, they will come to Home Assistant.

1:02:46And then there's people like Nilay that go to Hoops. Oh, got that one in soon. That's rough. By the way, switch from Hoops to Homebridge. We can get into it later. That will be the next holiday special. Garage door openers. God help us all. But wait, actually, garage door openers are like the thing, right? This is how I think about Home Assistant. There are all of these disparate smart devices in your house. Most of them cannot talk to each other. Yeah. The plan is for Matter to fix it on some timeline. And in the meantime, you have products like Home Assistant and HomeBridge and everything else that is basically the fanciest middleware to bridge everything into one platform and then expose control to your smartphone in some way.

1:03:36Yeah. And that seems like it will never be defeated. Like in my mind, Home Assistant will never be defeated, even if Matter shows up and works perfectly. Because every time I use my smart home, there's one thing that isn't going to work on Matter. Whether that's the garage door or whether it's the toaster or whatever it is, it's easier to bridge that into a common platform and then send it out than to be like, I will replace everything with a Matter device. Yeah. But Matter will help Home Assistant too, right? It'll make it a lot easier for Home Assistant to exist and to do these integrations, correct?

1:04:11I mean, it's not a direct competitor to any way. Oh, no, not at all. It's helping grow Home Assistant. Is it helping, Jen? That's a small question. Is it helping? What a good full question. At its core, Matter is a local standard, right? It allows devices to talk locally to the smart home hub. There is no previously, or even today, there's vacuums that will just only talk to the cloud. You have an app. You're standing next to the vacuum. You go through the cloud, back to the vacuum. Your internet is down. You cannot start your vacuum, like a room or something, because the cloud is necessary. With Matter, your phone will talk through Home Assistant locally, and Home Assistant will talk directly to vacuums.

1:04:52This is coming, by the way. This is not theoretically. We're waiting on that one. I mean, you'll hear me say this a lot. This is going to be theoretically the promise because a lot of this is not there yet. But yeah, we're going to be able to talk locally to these devices. So I think in general, it is good because for the first time in history, there's a smart home standard. And this gets a little bit nerdy, but it works over IP, right? So it means you have Wi-Fi, which we all have in our houses. You can already run Matter. And that means that out of the box, without extra radios, an Android phone, an iPhone can work with Matter.

1:05:26And everybody has the Google Home app. Everybody has the Apple Home app because they're pre-installed, which means that all of a sudden, if you need to make a business case, why am I going to choose Matter? Well, there's I don't know how many billion smartphones in the world. That's all Matter supported, right? So, oh, I'm going to use Matter, which means there's going to be a lot more devices that can work locally. Would you say that Matter is, so the way that Matter came in guns blazing was, you know, one protocol to rule them all. I feel like you don't agree with that. I may be wrong. Are the other protocols, do they still have a space here or is matter going to?

1:06:02Right. Well, that's, I mean, disclosure, I am, there's other smart home protocols and I'm on the board of the Z-Wave Alliance, right? Which is one of these other protocols. Wait, can you tell me if you guys are working on building a giant headquarters shaped like a Z? This is the only thing the Z-Wave Alliance should do. Not that I'm aware of. All right. Well. But for example, if you look at Z-Wave, Z-Wave works with QR codes that you pre-set up a device and it doesn't work over IP. And if you buy a house, Wi-Fi is not pre-installed, right? You always bring your own Wi-Fi router, but you cannot set up a matter device without a Wi-Fi router, right?

1:06:45So if we're thinking about, I want to have a smart home pre-installed with stuff because that's how I want to sell it to new people that move into homes that currently today does not work with Matter. So just purely on that fact, we need more smart home standards to kind of make that bridge and have that onboarding. Now, can everything be eventually one day solved in Matter? Yes. Will this take a long, long time? Also, yes. One of the things that I'm curious about with Home Assistant in particular is that it is the central platform, right? To me, the big mistake of the smart home for quite a long time has been the idea that we need to move it out of our houses and into someone's cloud, right?

1:07:26I mean, and so many devices I have effectively rely on some cloud service to operate, even to turn on or off. and the idea that I should have a server in my basement that actually runs my home and connects to everything, it seems very powerful. It also seems, I'm sure Jen has this experience all the time, when you talk to anyone about that idea, they're like, that's too hard. No one will ever do that. But then you're describing, well, we need to like pre-build houses with smart homes in them, with smart home stuff in them. And you kind of end up right back at, well, there needs to be a server in the basement so I can just sell that with the house.

1:07:57How do you square all of that? Because that's what I want is to say my house has a computer in it and I can just go look at that computer and tell you if it's working or broken, which is what Home Assistant provides for a lot of people. But that's not where the market is at all. Right. And I think that the problem that we're seeing in the market is that the moment you standardize something, it's commoditized. You cannot innovate. We look at – so people will go through the cloud to get these fancy effects are going. I think a server is just a box nowadays, right? Like you look at your Philips U hub, like that's a server.

1:08:33It's a small server, but the home assistant server, for example, is not that much bigger. You don't need to rack. You don't need more than two watts to power like a home assistant box. So I think we have to, like just like how we have electricity meters, how we have routers, how we have cable modems. I think having a device there to run your smart home is the future. And I talk to other people and they say, well, you're going to have a box that runs your AI agents, right? You don't have that in your fridge. You have a box that can power all the AI in all the different devices. Do you think that Matter makes it more likely that we will end up with more people having a local server, whether it's just a Raspberry Pi or not?

1:09:15You describe Matter as a local protocol. all that sort of implies that you're going to have a something in your house that will run everything i think so yes i think that there are players that are trying to push all the matter data to the cloud where they do all the processing but i believe that most people are also seeing like oh ongoing cloud costs like the industry is starting to realize a little bit like we're doing like you see google they're pushing some stuff local samsung is pushing some stuff local they see the speed. I mean, maybe this is more wishful thinking for my end because this is where I want it to be.

1:09:48But yeah, I hope it goes there. Yeah, I am really curious how you're thinking about Matter as a product guy right now. Because on the one hand, you work on Home Assistant, which is for people who are by and large willing to do a little bit of work to make this stuff work. And to Nila's point, you eventually hit a point with the smart home stuff where you either have to do this or you have hit the ceiling of what you can do in a smart home. What Matter seems to promise is it like it sort of lowers the barrier to entry at the very bottom of it. Like the thing Jen keeps telling me every time we come on the show and I get sad about Matter and she tells me it's going to be fine is like it just makes all of this easier, right?

1:10:25Like it just it makes building a smart home from nothing work. And that's very powerful. And I think just in terms of like getting people into this market, that's really valuable. But for you specifically, like I went through and read a bunch of the documentation and forum posts about Matter over the last year or so. And the response is so funny because it's a mix of people being like, oh, this sounds cool. And a bunch of people being like, well, I don't care about any of this. This is all snow problems that I currently have. So I am curious, how relevant does Matter feel to something like Home Assistant?

1:10:53So I think it is relevant. And it's mainly like the IP-based thing, the Wi-Fi-based. Matter can have cameras. None of the other smart home standards can have cameras. Vacuums have never made it to Z-Wave or Zigbee and they will probably never come. Like Z-Wave is honestly more like a home security standard, right? They have all the sensors. Zigbee is similar setup. Matter is actually kind of skipping some of these sensors, which is why sometimes in the smart home industry, people are annoyed with like, oh, it doesn't even do energy monitoring. And like, well, right now that is slowly coming. But in the meantime, cameras are coming, right?

1:11:29And like vacuums have launched as specification, not yet as firmware, but there's no product yet. but there's... Yes, we've been deep into this. We've launched the idea of vacuums. So I think there's a lot of good stuff coming out of the... Just Matter can do devices differently because they have more bandwidth. Now, I think, you know, when we talk about Matter, there's like this... I keep saying IP and Wi-Fi because those are the good parts of Matter, right? There's the threat part of Matter. and like you can do a whole episode about like that is a pretty bad shit show like that's just wait thread's a shit show yes why is thread a shit show yeah give us the three minutes on that so when they started thread they decided that with wi-fi it's too hard that people need to set up a network name and a password and that's then printed on the router cable modem and people have to go dig into it and see it and so they decided we're not going to let people deal with this we We're going to create automatically a thread network, configure a name and a key, and then we'll just send it to all the devices and you never have to know the network name and the network key.

1:12:40Then the second part is, it's a standard. Everybody's going to be able, it's a matching standard. Everybody's going to create border routers. So you're going to have like five border routers, one from Apple, one from Google, one from Samsung, one from Home Assistant. They all need to have this network key. The third part is, now we need this network key that you set up, for example, in your Google Home or your Apple Home to the Home Assistant Hub or to the Samsung Hub. They forgot that part. I'm so glad you explained it. You explained it so well, pals, because it is so confusing. But yes, this is where we've all ended up with multiple thread networks in our home, and so devices aren't connecting.

1:13:14The best part about doing shows with you, Jen, is you say things like, we've all ended up with multiple thread networks in our home. And that's true. I think the average American, when I look at these election results, They are pissed about having multiple thread networks in there. I have multiple thread networks. But this is like, you see the bits and bobs, right? Of like, we're going to start sharing network keys in the Eero app. Yeah. Are you just saying that's not coming to anything? I mean, they're trying to fix it now, but nobody really wants to open up enough. So for example, there's a new thread credential sharing that the Threat Group and the CSA have kind of collaborated on.

1:13:47but it's not anything more than just sharing QR codes to documentation and how you can get your credentials and copy-paste it into the next app. Like there are iOS and Android APIs, they just don't work. And Home Assistant is one of the few ways you can actually manually force all of your threadboard routers to work together. But it is a process and it's not necessarily, you know, one we would recommend to all the people that voted. Yeah, and it's not going to be successful. wait so i guess i have a question for both of you expressed in different ways and paul's we'll start with you because uh you represent the z-wave alliance the bitter rivals to thread i believe um the evil empire i'm so mad that there's not a z-shaped building you have a bias in favor of the z-wave alliance i have a bias in favor of novelty buildings um but like when i think about matter when we work with jen on coverage of matter devices thread is just a long for the ride, right?

1:14:47It's just like when these things happen together, then the big unlock happens, right? You can just go to the store and buy anything and you get matter over a thread and you get this low power, power saving network that automatically heals and it can reach everyone in your house. And you're saying that's just not happening. It is only happening if you stick to an existing, like a single ecosystem. So if you have everything Apple or everything Google, you're going to have a good time. But the truth is, is that the smart home doesn't work that way, right? We have this piecemeal together of equipment we have bought over the years.

1:15:23And you can't just ask somebody, throw away everything, buy everything Google. Now you can use this lock. Right, that's the problem we're trying to solve. Paulus, are you telling me we've solved no problems? Not yet. Okay. This is the thing. I think they are aware of it. And they're like, the thing is you have all these companies together And they have all these, you know, they're businesses, right? They want to make money. They want to protect their ecosystems. But they are also part of an alliance that creates an open standard about sharing these things. And so trying to find that balance is hard.

1:15:55And we see companies where their border router has bugs. They know that these bugs exist with other platforms. When they exist in bug themselves, their smart home controller talks directly to their border router bypassing the normal route. So people don't experience the bugs in their own ecosystem. but we are all experiencing these bugs where you step out of that ecosystem. So what is the Matter Protocol like to work with right now? I mean, one thing, Neil and I have spent a lot of time this year talking about ActivityPub, another of like everybody's favorite protocols that will save everything.

1:16:25And it has shipped no products. Yeah, right. And we keep talking to people who are like, this protocol is full of good ideas. It wants to do all the right things. And it is just fundamentally like somewhere between unfinished and broken in a bunch of really important ways. And they're all like, We'll get there someday, long history, sweep, whatever. Is Matter a good technical protocol at this point? Yes, mostly. So the good thing about Matter is that they actually took everything from ZigBee. They took everything they learned from HomeKit. They took everything from Google and Amazon. And they all said, you can use all our stuff, all our knowledge.

1:17:02We're not going to like, just let's build the best thing ever. And they built something that is very good. For example, they built into it that every meta device can be connected to five different smart home hubs at the same time. And from the Home Assistant app, you can share a meta device to Google Home. And now Google Home can control the device and has its own encrypted secure connection. The downside of all these adding the best features that they could think of is, okay, now we need bigger chips in our light bulbs because we need to have five encrypted connections to these five smart home hubs.

1:17:35And then the SDK kept growing, right? And so there's now more memory. And so the light bulbs are getting more expensive. Or Matter, you set it up with a QR code, but that QR code is only for the first time you set up the Matter device. Afterwards, you have to go to, for example, Home Assistant and share it to Apple or to Google. You cannot use that QR code again. But people don't know. They just use the QR code all the time, right? So security gets in the way of usability there. And so there's a lot of good stuff just at the pure foundational level of authentication onboarding. But we get to the layer of, oh, how good is it for energy monitoring?

1:18:14I think that stuff will come. That just takes time for people to agree. Then, of course, I feel like Matter, it gets a little bit overhyped. They release a new specification. Everybody makes all these articles, right? Like Matter 1.4 is here, 1.3 is there. So Jen's right here. You can just say it to Jen. She's right here. I don't say nice things about it always, though. She's smiling in that way. British people smile when they're pissed off. It works in home assistants usually, by the way, within two weeks. But then device manufacturers are like, well, I'm not going to release a MetaFirma for my vacuum because there's no controller supporting vacuums.

1:18:54And then the controllers are like, why am I going to add vacuums if there's no products that use vacuum? And so everybody's kind of looking at each other and kind of figuring it out. And at some point somebody breaks like the dam, right? And then like, oh, now we're having matter vacuums because that is a thing. And I mean, yeah. So it takes a while for something to be added to matter and be able available as a matter product that you can use. I feel like I'm learning a lot about the politics of the smart vacuum industry without having learned anything. But let me, can I just ask you a question?

1:19:26Like the dream, like what we talk about is you buy a bunch of stuff, you plug it into your house. And then you're just able to sort of control it from anywhere. My Google Home, I should just be able to say, turn on the lights in the kitchen. It just knows. I'm not setting up a floor plan on five different platforms, which is the thing you end up doing now. Yeah. You know, my wife won't use anything unless it's in Control Center on her iPhone. No other smart home platform exists except Control Center on the iPhone. So that is why I've prioritized a bunch of stuff I've prioritized. But I know that Home Assistant has much smarter automations, right, in a variety of ways.

1:20:00I know that Google and Amazon want to throw AI at a bunch of automation-ish things that they keep talking about. I would love to use that stuff and try it out. And to me, that's what Matter is supposed to do, right? It's just show me all the devices everywhere without a ton of complicated setup. And what I'm getting from you is that we're not close to that. You still need a central platform and all these things can talk to a central platform. Yeah. Do you think that's going away? Is there a timeline for Matter solves that and evaporates the central platform? I think that it will never go fully away because the moment something is part of Matter, it is a standardized, it's commoditized, you cannot innovate.

1:20:41And so there's companies that drive on innovation. They want to push the boundaries and that will never be able to be fully captured in Matter. So you're going to have extra systems that with their own APIs and that goes into Google, into a Home Assistant. And then how do you get it from Google into Home Assistant? You cannot. Anything that's in Home Assistant, you can push to Apple, you push to Google. That is all integrated correctly. So I don't think it's going fully away. It's just that more and more default things in a way, so light bulbs or logs, those will all go over matter. And the more complicated things like media players, that's a hot mess.

1:21:19Control, pausing, play, that's fine. But like browsing your library and putting on your Christmas playlist, there's no way that's going to be a matter in the next five years or ever. But do you think, this is actually a thing I've been wondering about a lot because I saw something that was like, when matter comes to TVs, that's when everything's getting. I was like, okay, I don't even have time to think about this. I think we wrote that article too. I just want to be clear. Yeah. No, we probably did. But I've started wondering, like, there's a version of the thing that you just described where it's like matter sort of handles the very basics.

1:21:47And then there's interesting competition and innovation on top of that. That actually strikes me as a not terrible outcome. That's the whole point, really. But then there's another version of it. But then the question on top of that, right, is how much do you push down into that protocol? And I just I wonder what that balance looks like over time. because the question of like, what is an interesting innovation that I did and what should just be baked in by default to every one of these devices feels like the most sliding scale, slippery slope of all time. You know, we're a member of the CSA Alliance, which is the alliance that makes Matter.

1:22:19And when you go to these member meetings and you talk to people, they want to put everything in Matter, right? Like, oh, manage your wireless router, manage like head that, because that connects to Matter in a way. Your wireless router should be part of Matter or everything that is electronics in your house should be part of matter, they believe. This is kind of the vision is we have solved onboarding, commissioning of devices and sharing devices between smart home controllers. We can use that as a base layer of, well, smart home is the first thing, maybe wireless routers. Well, you can say, you could consider that smart home, but maybe your car will be matter.

1:22:54Who knows? Yeah, I think who knows is the right... Jan, go ahead. It is the fundamental foundation that they were trying to fix. And then it does feel like it's maybe got a little ahead of itself, but it sounds like what you're talking about from the technical perspective is that that foundation is solid and it works and it does as it's said on the tin. It's just that when we bring the interoperability side or the platforms, the different manufacturers who all are implementing things in different ways, and perhaps that's where we're seeing some of this friction and difficult user experiences. But so it's really is that and Home Assistant, it seems from from my perspective, watching what's changed with the company over the last year or two is Matter is actually helping push Home Assistant to become more of a mainstream platform and not just the way you connect everything that couldn't connect to HomeKit.

1:23:53So in that sense, matter is succeeding in its goal, which is give it a simple foundation that every smart home device can use. And then companies can innovate and build experiences on top of matter. Is that, I mean, would you say that's? Yeah, I mean, that would be very nice. I just have these extremely dumb questions. Like, what is a smart home? Like, that's where my brain is. it feels like the product that everyone's trying to build is a smart home, not a light switch. And none of this stuff has solved the problem of where in the computing landscape is your home. Like as a product, it's just how do we shove a bunch of stuff together?

1:24:36Like to me, the big unlock of the smart home is that when we wake up in the morning and a little sensor in our hallway detects motion, the lights in the kitchen turn on. And you can't buy that out of the box. Like I had to be like that this is what i would like to have happen i need a phillips hue hub that has adaptive lighting that like all the way down to where will i program this logic of sensor is on after sunrise and lights go on in this mode and i had to figure all that out and it feels like matter doesn't solve that it just puts all the devices somewhere such that someone else can solve that but that seems like there will be no demand for a million matter devices unless anyone can articulate the value of having a bunch of smart devices.

1:25:19Well, I think this is where Google and Apple show what they want, right? They want to be competing on who can make a smart home platform. They don't want to make light bulbs. There's no margin on light bulbs, right? So it's a bit like those Android TVs you can buy. But once you start putting a bunch of DRAM in the light bulbs, it feels like. Have you seen Apple's RAM prices? We need more chips in the light bulbs. I just can't. That is in my brain forever. Apple's going to be like, this eight gigs of memory in the light bulb will cost$500. That's why your Apple Watch is as powerful as the first iPhone.

1:25:48This is like my light bulb. Anyway, sorry, I don't have to keep going. So they're competing with the platform. Well, they're competing on that level. So they just want, it's a bit like USB. They just want all the data and control, and then they can build innovative or user-facing experiences. It's a bit like, I don't know the vendor of my light switches here that are not smart, right? Because I just use them. They work. Electricity just works. I don't know who made my cables, all that stuff. and they just want to commoditize the light bulb. A smart light bulb should be, you just plug it in, you scan the QR code, now it's part of your smart home and then you're living in your Google world, in your Apple world and do these kinds of things.

1:26:25But of course, because home assistance is at the same level operating as Google and Apple, we bring everything together, we are seeing a huge benefit from this because we also get all that data now. Right, so here's the reveal of my little story, which is that the motion sensor in the hallway is the motion sensor in my Ecobee thermostat, that which is bridged right all the way into all of the stuff with some i don't even know it's some combination of home bridge and home kit and she's like there's just a mess of like emergent behaviors that turn on the lights in the morning and one day it's going to wake up and kill us all right like i don't know exactly how that computer works but it works and but it's that thing which is like there's already a motion sensor here and i should be able to just get at it and use it to program other stuff.

1:27:09And that, again, like, I don't think Apple and Google see that is like, you're buying all this stuff with all these redundant capabilities in your house. Like turning on a light in the morning is like an incredible signal about a bunch of other stuff that should happen. Right. Yeah. Are you doing that in home assistant? Is that letting you say, okay, like as Jen is saying, matter, let's you bring more stuff directly into home assistant instead of just serving as the bridge. Is that now saying, okay, we can, we can show people like, because now we're able to compete on the platform level with Apple and Google, we're not all trying to build custom light switches.

1:27:41We're going to make this smart home platform more powerful or capable or even more interesting? I mean, well, that's always the thing we've been doing, right? It's like to build on top. Like we built, getting all the devices into a single place was only because we want to build stuff on top. And we added like, you know, the APIs are open. Anyone else is messing with it. There's third party dashboards and automation engines and AI that's all plugging into Home Assistant because nobody else wants to, nobody wants to solve that problem of getting all that data into a single place. I think that you're talking about like your motion sensor, that is a super interesting use case and bring it all together, very impressive.

1:28:21But if you look at like - I just push buttons until lights turn on. I'm not trying to get it. Right, but if you look at Apple, well, I think they're more interested right now in robot arms or iPads thingies, right? Like there's, of course, yeah, they have different priorities, but also their apps are installed on a billion phones. So they must have like, this is the entryway into the smart home world and just getting everything into a UI that you can control it is already like the first step. And they're happy if like the majority of the people can do that. Where in Home Assistant, you get to Home Assistant because you had a problem you couldn't solve.

1:28:58We can solve it for you. We give you all the knobs and tools, like it's the most extensive toolkit, which is also what confuses people sometimes because there's so much data on your screen. But then everything is possible as long as you can dream up the solution. So, Nila, you're able to dream this up. I think the majority of the people, like our parents, they are not going to think, oh, if there's a motion sensor here, then I can turn on the light there. That will not cross their mind. So there is a gap that we need to solve in every smart home platform in a way that we can tell the user, we see that you act like this every morning, or we see you doing this, or this is an idea you can do, and then they can apply it.

1:29:40Well, and that comes from the smart home platform. But then what Matter, I think, is going to help with is that exact problem that Nilay had was finding a device that was going to trigger his lights. So because Matter provides device-device communication in your home, you can now, and this has happened now, I think Eve has devices like this, that you can buy a device that has been bound already. So when you get your light bulbs, it will come bound with a smart switch. So then you just put them in your house and they will work. You don't have to go through any kind of setup process in the app to get it to turn on the lights when you want it to.

1:30:15But then you can use an app or a smart home platform to add that extra layer like the adaptive lighting so that it turns on the lights at the right time of day to the right time of temperature. So, you know, you've basically got three layers. You've got the communication foundation layer. Then you've got the devices. And because the device manufacturer who makes that switch and that light that can be bound together through binding can now work with all the platforms through Matter without having to have spent all of their time and resources for a small startup or open source home platform, working with all these big platforms like Apple Home and Google, they can put their resources into developing a better product.

1:31:00and then work with these platforms on top. That's like the three-layer cake, really, of what matters. That is the theory. Binding devices together has never, ever worked. Zigbee, Z-Wave, the technology works, but explaining it to the user that this device publishes these signals and you can wire them up to that signal, and then now the motion sensor who's turning on the light is responsible for turning off the light because they turned it on, right? They have to turn it off. Is that a new signal? Is that built into the motion sensor? In Home Assistant, because we have all these different technologies, we have that feature tucked away.

1:31:38Nobody ever really uses it. Let me ask a very... Let me just try to do a metaphor here. Bluetooth was invented in 1997. Right? AirPods took until 2016. The ultimate Bluetooth device. The thing that everybody wanted in the end. And Apple had to make like a special Bluetooth to do it. That's a long time. That's 20 years. Yeah. Where are we? More than 20 years, right? It's 21 years. I don't think you can have like an AirPods moment for Matter because you're always working with all these different devices. So yes, maybe there will be a, maybe if Apple makes a light bulb, it will work perfectly within their system.

1:32:22but then people need to have that everything into one ecosystem right like apple always has the the benefit of controlling the whole stack they have your macbook they have your iphone and then your airpods and they can automatically switch and do all the magic in matter world that is just not going to happen you might have your google thread border router or you might have a zigbee light bulb that goes through your smart home system or something right if everything has to work together, I think that will be hard. I remember Jen said to me over a year ago that if I could just convince you to renovate your entire house all at once, this is actually a really easy problem to solve.

1:33:00The problem is that that's not a real thing that anyone's going to do. But you still won't be able to get a garage door, right? The garage door companies have no incentive to use matter. The companies I see that have a lot of incentive to use matter are the big appliance companies because I think they do not want to suffer cloud costs for the entire life of an appliance. And I think they know that a subscription fee for the garbage features they offer in their apps will never fly. So Matter is great for them. They're like, your stuff's on Wi-Fi. The timer went off, you get a notification, we can just do this in the standard, you're good to go.

1:33:35Then there's the super commodity stuff like light bulbs and those smart plug outlets and stuff where it's very hard. Everything in the middle, even the robot vacuum, seems like political drama times a thousand. Oh, for sure. Do you see that getting any better that we'll just have a base layer of commodity stuff or base level of commodity connectivity and then we're going to layer on top? Because that's what you really want. That's USB. That's Bluetooth, right? There's a base layer of Bluetooth and there's Apple being like, AirPods, special Bluetooth, but it's still Bluetooth. Yeah, I think that we will see more things being commoditized And at some point, like robot vacuums, they just keep adding more features now, right?

1:34:13Now they have AI automatically creating a gallery of the pets when they photo it, when they drive past vacuuming. And that will never make it to matter, right? Because they try to get you. I'm okay with that. I just want to say on the record, I'm okay with that. That doesn't need to be part of the protocol. The full mugshot gallery. Yeah, I'm good. We can leave that proprietary. But we're going to see more things commoditized. But I think there will be always things. people always want to have you use their app, right? The business benefit. I've talked to garage door opener manufacturers that are not my cue.

1:34:47And they're like, we would love to work with you, but also we have business cases. And how, if it's in Home Assistant, all our business cases fall flat because people can just use Home Assistant and use everything else. And that's competing with our own business. And I'm like, yeah, but this is what users want. But that's just, you know, they have to create shareholder value. So let's just cast out a year or two before we go here. I think there's the question of like, how long is matter going to take? I think is like, maybe a year, maybe the heat death of the universe. But I am curious, like for you, as you're thinking about even just like the next 12 months, it feels like you're describing this really interesting race where matter is going to try to sort of contain more devices and more things.

1:35:34While you at Home Assistant are continuing to work on making all of that stuff and everything else more accessible to more people. What does that race look like over the next 12 months? It's a good question. i think we are i think you know matter will just keep chugging along right like there will be like you know we'll celebrate the new specs we'll see like one or two new devices uh being capable like to be implemented and then like you know in two years three years they will arrive i think where matter can shine will be energy management in the home i think there's a lot of people talking about i want to charge my car when it's the solar power is like being very giving me cheap energy for example i think that's something where okay you have three four devices that need to speak matter you have a smart home controller that isn't just for smart home but is energy specific you just have a smart matter energy controller device that is just controlling your car the charger and plugs into your solar panels and just that piece can run over there.

1:36:39I think that with Home Assistant, we have all that data. We are, like I said before, we're a toolkit. We make like a toolbox, right? Like with all the tools. Our dream is to make more solutions, but then you need like a team. Oh, now we have a team of three people just looking at energy. And we're doing that. We're working with like universities nowadays, but that's just like years in the making to get there. So for us, we just keep chugging along, just adding all the devices as they come and see kind of what grows in our ecosystem. And you're cool with being a power user thing for a while? I feel like there's part of me that says, like, on principle, you shouldn't have to, like, know what a Raspberry Pi is to be good at the smart home.

1:37:18But it also feels like that's just where we're going to be for a while. We have ready-made hubs, right? You can buy a Home Assistant Green$99 and you have Home Assistant. But I think we always want to be power users. Now, how much of a power user you have to be, that will get lower and lower. But I don't want to... A person shouldn't start with Home Assistant. They will always... I see this whole journey of you have first five smart apps. You don't even realize you have a smart home. Then you go with Google, Apple. You run into limitations. Then you get to Home Assistant. And I think that journey, it shouldn't change because people come to Home Assistant, they have at least some knowledge.

1:37:55They have a problem they want to solve, and it will help them find the right tools and we get familiar with the system. Well, I know one of the things you've said you're working on is that sort of spousal approval factor too, like making the smart home easier to control for the rest of the home. Like Nila's point about the Apple Control Center, I mean, having an easy interface, because it's great if you've got someone that's willing to do the tinkering, but then to be able to, because the smart home is not personal, it's not just for one person most of the time. There are other people, whether you live with them or they're visiting, who are coming into your home that need to be able to interact.

1:38:29And that, I think, is a really interesting, I mean, that's something that very few platforms have really successfully solved. It's a hard one. Zero, in fact. Yeah, we even thought about if we should add a survey button that users that are not the admin can give feedback to their admin what they like on the dashboard. That's good. That's very good. My survey button is just my wife yells at me. I will never forget the moment that I rigged up one of the lights in our newborn baby's room. And then I turned it off with the app. And then she went in and tried to turn it on. And I was like, oh, no, you can't.

1:39:07You have to turn it on with the app because I turned it. And she was like, what in the holy hell are you talking about? And that was the end of my smart home. I don't have the deep inside. I just know that you screwed up. I'm sure I did. Whatever Anna said is right. Anna is correct. And Matter will fix it in 2068. You heard it here. All right. You guys have any more questions before we let our friend Paulus here go? I just have one. It's just a pickup, and maybe we just sort of done. I'm curious. You see the whole ecosystem, right? There's the big companies doing all the big company stuff. There's a proliferation of apparently ruthless vacuum manufacturers who are going to solve this problem.

1:39:44Then there's this class of smart home gadget companies that seems to exist to make the commodity stuff. like me ross is just like smart plugs however many shapes and sizes smart plug you want there's a million of them are those sustainable businesses in a world of matter like does that standard enable more of those companies to exist because they seem like betting on them to run my home if i don't know if the company's gonna last the cloud server might go down the firmware updates might never be there and there's security problem like does matter solve that problem where that stuff stays more stable and those companies get to exist longer or is it they're just taking advantage of the opportunity.

1:40:21We need a restabilization. I think a lot of middle level companies will go away. The more luxury light bulbs like Philips Hue have a reason to exist. They have quality lights ecosystem. At the bottom of the cheaper market, it's just going to be a race to the bottom. It's not about you download the firmware from Expressive provides the chips for example. They have firmware for their light bulbs. You don't need to even know about matter. You just build this and it really becomes a race on logistics. Who gets it the cheapest to be in the shop when the user or the consumer is buying a light bulb? Will those companies exist?

1:40:55Well, if they use the Espressif firmware as is, Espressif will do the firmware updates, actually. And Matter has a way to distribute these. And, like, for example, Home Assistant can install Matter firmware updates. And so that is a possibility. Will it work that way? Or should the one that actually put the Espressif chip in sign off on something? I don't know. Maybe that will go wrong. It will probably go wrong. is a light bulb very important to be secure? As in more so with matter, because we're talking IP, right? Threat devices could also, certain border routers allow threat devices to talk to the internet.

1:41:33Bad idea. It is possible. So yeah, we need better security. So yeah, it's a shit show. But you'd still be able to use that MIROS if MIROS went out of business and it was a Matter plug, you would still be able to use that Mi Rose plug. And you would still be able to use it in Home Assistant because it's a local. So you wouldn't lose the functionality. But yes, there is still a lot of fuzziness around the firmware updating and how that's going to work because originally it was intended that it would all go through Matter. And then that hasn't, that's sort of coming in. Yeah, because that has to go through the platform.

1:42:11So yes, that's still an area where it's murky. We have the firmware updates working, but then there was a bunch of firmwares on the like it's weird it's kind of a blockchain place where they store the firmwares that's a different story but no it was invented when blockchains were a hype so they have a distributed ledger they don't call it blockchain but that's where the firmwares are stored but there are certain firmwares stored there that are incorrect so we upload it to a plug and we break the plug and then who's responsible like we just got your firmware from the blockchain. Like, who put it on the blockchain?

1:42:45That person is, that company is responsible, but they are like, but I uploaded it to your light bulb. And so yeah, there's firmware updates are definitely not solved yet. Who put it on the blockchain is the Christmas song that needs to exist. Anyway, all right. We should let you go. We should get out of here. We're ending all of this as soon as you said it's a shit show. So don't even, don't even. Okay, good. There's no coming. There's no improving on that. But thank you so much for doing this with us. This was incredibly fun. Awesome. We appreciate it.

1:43:18All right, we got one more quick thing to do, and then we're going to get out of here and go do holiday things. This is the VergeCast hotline. As always, you can call 866-VERGE11, email vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. We are off for the next couple of weeks, but we will still be listening to every single hotline question and reading every single email several times because it's just a delightful way to spend my time over the holidays. Liam, who's the sponsor for the hotline? This week's Vergecast hotline is presented by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS.

1:43:50Beautiful. All right, Jen, I have not prepared you for what this is, but this is a thing you and I have talked about before. So I'm just going to play the question. We'll go where we go. Sound good? Okay, sounds good. All right. Hey there, this is Keith from West Des Moines, Iowa. So I'm calling as I have been encountering a problem more and more over recent years. And this Thanksgiving, it felt like it came to a head. You know, over the years, I've accumulated a number of recipes online that I like. And I just threw those in a bookmark and would come back to them down the road whenever I wanted to make that recipe.

1:44:24But given the way Google handles search engine optimization and referrals and all that stuff, these recipes are increasingly just no longer present. I often can find them on archive.org and can track down what they looked like in 2012 or what have you and can recover those recipes. But it feels like those weeds are getting more and more tenuous. I was wondering if there's maybe an app that I could be using to collect some of these recipes together with the idea being that, A, I can preserve them so I don't need to worry about losing them down the road. And then ideally, it would be something where perhaps I could put these recipes in such a format that I could use some of my smart devices to help me go through the actual process of cooking if I've rendered these recipes in a more readable format for the devices.

1:45:20Anyway, I hope that, you know, you may be able to give me some leads on things that might help me. So my Thanksgiving next year is a little bit more straightforward. Thank you so much. Have a good day. Jen, you see why I've brought you this question. Yes, I feel his pain as well. So I have a couple of ideas to throw out and things that I've tried. But I'm very curious to hear for you, especially as a person who is very committed to the idea of, like, integrating all of this stuff into your smartphone or your smart home setup, how you're making all of this work. Tell us about your setup right now.

1:45:51In terms of recipes, I have been using the Samsung Food app for a while. That does what he's asking, which is pulls all the data and puts it into the Samsung Food app. And so it's not actually a link to the recipe, although there is a link in there, but you have all the data. But the problem is the link is still there And the issue he's having is he's going to these links and they've gone away. So right now, the way the Samsung Food Apps works, depending on what the format of your recipe was, it does actually pull the ingredients. So you get all the ingredients. Then a separate tab has all the step-by-step instructions.

1:46:36And then you can click and actually read the full recipe in all its glory. It also, in theory, works with things like TikTok recipes and Instagram recipes, though I've never managed to get it to do that, which seems a little more complicated. But the Samsung food app is so. And just to make this because I love the smart kitchen, one of the main reasons I use it is because I can pull it up on my smart fridge. And then I have the big screen recipe, which is key because using your phone when you're cooking and looking at recipes, it's never good. And some recipes will have this feature where you can like force the phone to stay open so that it doesn't lock while you're using it.

1:47:15Yeah, they call it like cook mode or whatever. Cook mode. Yeah, that's useful. But my absolute favorite sort of fail-safe recipe app that I've dumped all my recipes into over the years and they never go away is paprika, which I love. Paprika's been around forever. Has been around forever. And that's a good thing, you know, like it's still there. So my recipes are all still there. So I've been trying the Samsung food thing sort of as an experiment, and it's got some interesting features. But paprika is still my go-to. And then I will pull it up on my iPad. I haven't found a way to pull it up on a smart display, though, which is, you know, I'm more and more getting – I've been testing the 21-inch Echo Show for cooking recipes in the kitchen.

1:47:58It's like, oh, so much space. You can also, like, slice things on top of it. That's what we need. And honestly, I have never thought about this until right now, but a smart display that is also a cutting board is a thing that should exist, and I want it very badly. Actually, Bosch did actually make that. Did he really? Can I buy it? No, it was at CES like 2018, I want to say. And it was like a projector that projected your recipe or different things onto your countertop. Yes, you're right. That's what we need. I want this. okay so I paprika is a really good app and is one of the ones I was going to suggest I would just throw two other ones in there's an app called pestle that is also very good and does very similar things and it as far as I understand does a really good job of pulling recipes out of TikTok and Instagram I'm really glad you mentioned that actually because this is one of the things that I have been looking for personally I use an app mostly for recipes called Mela M-E-L-A.

1:49:00It's made by the same guy who makes Reader, the RSS Reader app. It's just like lovely and beautifully designed and it's very plain text and I really like it. But increasingly, I'm finding recipes I want to try on social. You see like, oh, those cinnamon buns look really good. And so the question of like, can you extract something out of that actually becomes really interesting. And I haven't played with Pestle enough to be able to say this with great certainty for myself, but I hear really good things that its ability to import a recipe from Instagram or TikTok is very good. I don't know how that's possible, though, because they're not actual recipes half the time.

1:49:34I mean, that's normally just some person throwing things in a bowl. It's just like 11 pounds of butter and some spaghetti. And they're like, look, it's muffins. It's like that can't possibly be muffins. I like I know enough to know that's not muffins. But people say it works. So that's one I would say. And the other one is crouton. which is another one that people really like and has done some really interesting stuff over recent years to make itself work. And Crouton does a really good job of making your grocery list for you. Some of these apps, which I really like, you can meal plan inside of them.

1:50:13Are you a meal planner? I've tried to be. I really aspire to be a meal planner. I know, that is an aspirational thing. And it's just that two hours, sit down on a Sunday evening plan for the week. It just never happens. Yeah. But one thing, if you are a meal planner, one thing some of these apps will do is you basically mark the recipes you're going to make and it will actually make a shopping list for you. And you'll be like, here are all the things that you need in order to make all of this food. Yeah. Samsung Food does that for you, too. And then you can send it to Instacart. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good idea.

1:50:42And if you are more organized than I am, I highly recommend it. Then you'll have like two teaspoons of paprika on your shopping list. I know. There is that. And then it's like, oh, instead, I'll just go to Costco and buy eight pounds of it I'll never use. And I will say this is one thing where like we've talked about this sort of Samsung vision for the kitchen. And I find it really compelling for exactly that reason. Right. Because you can go you should be able to go both ways where you should be able to say, here's what I want to make. Tell me what I need. Or I have these eight ingredients in my fridge.

1:51:12What can I make with it? And it feels like Samsung is the closest to being able to do all of that kind of coherently in one place. Well, and they just actually this week announced new screens in devices, which, you know, I know we don't like the screens everywhere. But, you know, a little screen on top of your cooktop that's actually showing you your recipe as you're cooking it. I can see a use case there. And they've also made a smaller screen for the fridge. So if you like the idea of having your recipe in your fridge, but you don't like the idea of the 25-inch screen or whatever the size is, they now have the Family Hub fridge has a smaller screen.

1:51:50So you can – but yeah, the screens – I thought you were saying like a fridge magnet, but it's a screen. Can you just stick it on? I've seen people do that with iPads. Oh, sure. Like use them in their kitchen as recipe – to do recipes and put it on a magnetic mount. Mine goes on top of the toaster. That's where my iPad goes. I know. I'm just the dangers. It's a disaster of an idea. It's a disaster of an idea. Yeah. And I have ruined at least one magic keyboard just with spillings and things. Like, I'm a very aggressive whisker, it turns out. And that is bad for Apple iPad keyboards. So they're like fabric-y keyboards.

1:52:26Yeah. Yeah. But so here's my question about Samsung Food is if you didn't have any other Samsung stuff, but you just wanted one of these like recipe organizers, to some extent, they're all samey a little bit. They have the same kinds of features. you're just picking on like design and platforms and stuff like purely on its own is samsung food good enough that you would tell people to like give it a whirl oh yeah yeah because it was based on whisk which was one of the original smart recipe apps i mean that's basically it is whisk now it does have a lot of ads in it that's the only downside but rest if you if you use recipes on the internet you're used to ads um but you can pay to get rid of the ads um and then there's a lot of recipe apps actually you do have to pay for i think paprika i had to pay for it it was very expensive i think it was like seven dollars or something which at the time but eight years ago was quite a lot for an app um but yes i do i do like it um it works well it's the you the layout to get from the main main samsung food page to your recipes that you've saved that's not an easy process um they're trying there's a lot of and a lot of recipe apps will do this, I've noticed like trying to show you, suggest to you what you should cook as opposed to, I know what I'm going to cook.

1:53:38I need to go find my recipe. Just let me, let me at it, get rid of all the cruft. But if you're looking for inspiration ideas, you can add your food list to it. We did this whole thing on the VergeCaster a while back where, you know, now they've actually made that a lot easier to do. You can just scan food and it will add it to your list. And so you can sort of say, you know, what should I cook tonight? Suggest from my list, what food I have in my house or snap a picture of the food you have. And it can suggest food recipes you could make with that food. I haven't found that useful at all. It's a neat idea.

1:54:14It is a neat idea. But at some point it might be easier to just type the words into your search engine. Yeah. And the one thing I haven't tried that I really want to try is apparently if you're at a restaurant and you're eating a dish that you love, you can snap a picture of the dish and it will create the recipe for you. Oh, that's cool. Which would be very neat. Yeah, that would be. For me, it would just be like, how do I make Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets in my house? That's all I want to know. Air fryer. Yeah, it's true. I bought one and I have used it two times. And this holiday season is when David becomes an air fryer genius.

1:54:47It's happening. Okay, I'm excited for you. Thank you, I appreciate it. All right, so Samsung food, paprika, pestle, crouton, Mila. Somewhere in there is one that will work for you. It feels good. Try them all. Save recipes. Like it is true that all of these recipe sites are very fleeting. Things get weird. Visit them. Look at them. Print them out. Print them out. They need your clicks to exist, but save the recipes because they will not be around forever. All right, Jen, thank you for doing all of this. People should know we basically sprung this entire thing on you last minute and then you won the game, which is incredibly rude.

1:55:22But thank you for doing this whole thing with us. This was very fun. It was really fun. I enjoyed it. It was a lovely way to celebrate the spectacular holiday season. And next year, better than a D. Okay. That's the goal. That's the goal. We're just matter, matter. Shows improvement. Yeah, C - next year. I mean, my kids have a lot of Ds, so D isn't bad in my mind. It's still passing. That's all you need. All right, Jen, thank you. I know, I just learned that. You know that that is still a passing grade. I always thought it was a C. I really hope their grandparents don't listen to this. Listen, everybody's just had her doing their best, Jen.

1:56:01That's all. It's the holidays. All right. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Thanks.

1:56:10And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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1:57:29Rinse. It's time to be great.