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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Hypatel, Editor and Chief of the Verge. Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're going to talk about one of the oldest, most important, and most challenging dreams in the history of the tech industry. The smart home. The idea of your house responding to you and your family and generally being as automated as smart as your phone or your laptop has inspired generations of technologists. But after decades of
promises, it's all still pretty messy. I have a lot of smart home gear in my house and I'll be blunt. None of it really works well unless you want to spend a lot of time and effort custom designing your own setup or paying someone else a lot of money to do it for you. And even then, it can be kind of hit or miss. But there are some promising developments out there that might make it a little
better. One from Big Tech and another from the open source indie community. To help sort it all out, I'm talking to Verge Smart Home Reviewer Jen Tuy, who is one of the most influential reporters on the smart home beat today. Now, the big problem with the smart home has been blindingly obvious for a very long time. It's interoperability. Different smart home gadgets from different companies just don't work very well together. And they don't all work with your phone
or the voice assistant in your house in the same way. That means you either have to lock yourself into one company's ecosystem like Apple or Google or you're going to spend a bunch of time figuring out ways to force things to work together. The good news is that the Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung know this is a problem and they've put out a standard called Matter which launched in 2022. And it's hard. Matter is supposed to be like HDMI or USB or Wi-Fi
for the smart home. A way for different device types to talk to each other, no matter what platform you use to control your smart home. But new kinds of devices have been added to Matter in a painfully slow way. And the platform owners like Apple and Google have been dragging their feet on supporting whatever new device types do get added to Matter. Matter has been around for two years and as you'll
hear Gen say, not much has really changed because of it. That said, things are moving. This week marks the launch of Matter 1.3 which adds a bunch of new device types and capabilities to the standard. Ideally, that pushes the platform owners to expand their support for Matter and things get a little bit more seamless and easy to use. Gen and I ran down all the things that Matter can do now and what it still needs to do to solve some of the problems that still persist. But here's the thing,
that's what's happening on the big tech side of the house. There's a really long running debate in all of computing about whether letting big platform owners run software for you is better than running software yourself on a server in your home. And there's an open question as to whether consumers want or need a computer like that in their home that controls basically everything so that they can troubleshoot their own smart homes. And there's a lot of movement on that side of
things as well. A number of open source hobbyist projects have sprung up to fill in gaps in the platforms that Amazon and Google and Apple offer their customers. And some of those projects are going from hobbyist status to full-fledged products. You'll hear Gen and I talk a lot about a home assistant which is open source smart home control software that has now launched a foundation focused on privacy and security. So it can try to grow even bigger and offer a counterbalance to
the big tech version of the smart home. Home assistant also has a new hub called the Home Assistant Green which is supposed to sit in your house and connect to everything else. There's a lot of other projects focused on local control and privacy that are kind of bringing us back to those DIY routes of the smart home. And I got to say the more I mess with my own smart home setup, the more I think that maybe turning your house into a computer should require you to build your
own system so you can fix it when it breaks. Or at least that's what I tell myself when everything breaks in the house. Okay, the state of the smart home. Here we go. Gen Tilly, welcome to Decoder. Hello, Neely. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited about this episode. I think our producers are very worried about it because when you and I get going talking about smart homes, all hell breaks loose.
And then everyone spends a lot of money and then things only slightly work. But I think we can solve it today. That's our goal for this episode. Solving the smart home. We can do it in 30 minutes. So there's two things that really maybe want to talk to you about it. Obviously you've been covering the space for a long time. You know all the players, you know the people. The idea has been pretty simple for a very long time. Your house should be full of sensors and various products in your house
should be able to take action for you. React to those sensors, you open the door, the heat turns on the lights are on the shades move. That idea has been around since the 50s. It's a very old idea. And we've been stumbling towards it for quite some time. I think with the advent of mobile phones and cheap arm processors and Android, like now there's like a million products that can do this stuff for you in your house. But it still doesn't quite work. Can you describe the current state
of smart home technology? Yeah. So today what the smart home does really well is solve a singular problem that you might have. So like you go and buy a smart device to make sure you can shut your garage door remotely or turn your lights on and off with a voice command. If you have it's something you want to do in your home, smart home technology can help solve that. That's what it does really well. The smart home has exceeded in these single use case solutions.
What it's not doing well yet and where the most potential is is that integration, where things work together. I'm not saying it never works. There are motion sensors to turn on your lights, great experience. There's lots of different elements like you can have geofencing so that if you drive up to your house, your lights turn on, your door unlocks, those types of things work. But you have to have the right
devices. You have to have the right system. You have to do a fair amount to set it up. So yeah, those kind of magical moments as experiences that we think about when we think about a smart home, a home that reacts to us intelligently. Those are still hard to do. That symbiosis, that whole intelligent home still feels far away or hard to get to. You can do it, but you will be spending a lot of time. It's not even necessarily money. It's time. We both have these. You have a vastly more
confusing smart home situation than I do because you are our smart home reviewer. But it's not money. You can spend a lot of money and it won't work. You have to spend the time making it all work together. That seems like the core problem. The smart part of the smart home still is very reliant on some individual homeowner doing a system integration. Making all the stuff work together, whereas the sort of, I moved the light switch to be a button on my phone is well-insolved.
Right. Yes. You can spend a lot of money and pay someone to do it for you. That's another world. But it's interesting because you can see from those examples, like the high-end, professionally installed systems, that it is possible to have all of this work seamlessly together. But with round the clock, IT support and well-trained people, that I think one of the other big problems, even in those scenarios of the smart home today, is that it doesn't work for everyone in
the smart home. I, my home's cis admin, I'm sure you're your home's cis admin. My husband and my children could tell you some stories about it. They're just like living in a smart home. But then there are benefits that they miss when we're traveling. My son isn't very good at using light switches and he's never used a key. Incredible. My son isn't very good at using light switches as one of the most average outcomes I can possibly think of. It's very good.
But yes, not everyone understands smart homes unless everyone's on board, it can get really complicated for anyone living in the home. Your home starts to have a user interface, like in a very real way. You have to know how to use your house. Very much so, yes. So this gets to kind of the heart of the problem, right? The idea is anyone should be able to use the house. A small idea with massive implications, but that kind of means like all the devices should
show up on everybody's phones, however the phones wish to express home control. All of your voice assistance should be able to talk to all the things so you can just tell Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant to do something and it should happen. The user interface of your house should be expressed everywhere that user interfaces are expressed the same way that Netflix works on every device that you might have or you can open Google Docs on any device with a browser and it just works.
None of that seems to work in the house yet. There is a standard that we cover quite a bit, you cover quite a bit, called Matter. They just had a new release. That was supposed to fix it, but it just seems like it's a very incremental progress. What is going on with Matter? So Matter is a connectivity standard that's designed to make us smart devices work better together. Right now, the problem as I've expressed is it's confusing, it's complicated, it requires a lot of
time. I often get these comments, well, why would you need a smart light where you can just go flip the switch? Everything works well, but the smart home can make it better. The smart home can make things easier. There's a lot of advantages around like energy management, security, safety, convenience, comfort, all the stuff. But right now, the communication between devices is really poor. The interoperability is a real struggle. Matter is designed to create one common communication
thread so that everything can work together. Alongside Matter, there's also something called thread. Along with Wi-Fi and Ethernet, thread is the main protocol that Matter runs on. So thread is a wireless protocol that was specifically built for smart home devices that use low power and low bandwidth, like sensors, smart locks, lights. It's similar to Zigbee and Z-Wave protocols, but it's IP-based. And it doesn't need a central hub or bridge for communication,
because thread devices can talk directly to each other. Thread does need a thread border router, though, to talk to the cloud and to other networks. The first Matter spec launched in 2022. It's been two years, which is not a huge amount of time in the scheme of things, but everyone has really been needing a standard like this because the smart home is just so fractured and confusing and complicated right now. I've been following it very closely and it feels like
it's just not moved forward. But this new release, 1.3, which was just announced yesterday, adds about five or six new device types. So Matter now really covers most of the categories that you'd want in your home, except for cameras and security systems. But they've added ovens, extractor hoods, cooktops, dryers, and that's in addition to thermostats, blinds, robot vacuums, refrigerators,
freezers, locks, thermostats, pretty much all the appliances in your home. Plus, there's also a robust energy management addition to this spec, which will open up a lot of really interesting use cases and water management for things like leak detection, freeze detection, rain detection. So there's a lot here and I think it's going to be a really interesting shift for Matter.
The problem is this is an industry standard and it's been developed by all the companies that create smart home devices and smart home platforms led by Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung. And it's just kind of sat there. Like nothing has happened to the last two years. Apple has not added any of the new device types from 1.2 to the home app, who knows when they'll get to 1.3. Amazon and Google have similarly been dragging their feet. None of the new device types from 1.2
are supported. Samsung has been a little more proactive, but for example, none of them support robot vacuums in matter yet. So we're waiting for the platforms to step up and say, okay, we created this standard. Now we're actually going to let you use it. Because right now, they're dragging their feet and I don't know why. We need to take a quick break. When we're back, Jen and I dive into my smart home standards have
not been as effective as HDMI or Bluetooth. Support for this show comes from Wix Studio. Debate time. Who gets more out of Wix Studio? Designers or Devs? First off, if you don't know about Wix Studio, it's a web platform offering the flexibility agencies and enterprises need to deliver bespoke sites hyper efficiently. Now back to the debate. Designers, you can create fully responsive websites starting with a blank canvas or choose
a template for any layout and tweak per pixel with your CSS. If no codes your thing or you just like to move fast, there's also a ton of smart features like native no-code animations and responsive AI that adjusts every breakpoint. Devs, Wix Studio offers a powerful suite of home-grown web APIs and REST APIs. Quickly integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code-based IDE alongside an AI code assistant. Designers or developers, search Wix Studio and find out for yourself.
This week on the gray area, Professor Diana Pousulka and I tackle one of life's biggest questions. Are we alone in the universe? What would it take for you to step off the agnostic ledge and say, yeah, aliens are real? Is it a spacecraft landing on the White House lawn? Well, something that was anomalous in 1952 did fly over the White House and that's one of those cases that is still weird. That's this week on the gray area available wherever you get your
podcast. Eurovision is here. This year's contest gets underway this week in Malmuss, Sweden, but this year's contest comes with a dose of controversy. I'll give you one guess as to what people are mad about. Yes, correct. It's that. Organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest say they are assessing whether Israel's entry breaks the rules of political neutrality. I think it's a shame. I think there's no way that that Israel should be able to participate in Eurovision.
Propalisting in protesters are taking to the Swedish streets more than a thousand Swedish artists, including Robin have called for an Israel ban. Some European politicians are joining them. Charlie Harding from Switched On Pop joins us this week on today's explain to help us figure out if Europe can sing its way out of this situation. We're back with Verge Smart Home Reviewer Gen2ee to talk more about matter and what has made existing Smart Home standards so lackluster.
We cover a lot of standards here at the Verge. They are invisible. They are undercover generally. They are usually dominated by rich companies doing politics with each other. HDMI is a standard. HDMI is a surprisingly political standard and it just plugs Roku's in a TV's. It's still surprising political Bluetooth, maybe the most political standard of them all. Matter feels like it hasn't even gotten to the politics stage because no one's adopted it.
And my theory is that no one's going to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone because it supports robot vacuums when you can just open the robot vacuum app. No one's switching from Android to an iPhone because the home app on the iPhone supports rainsheds now. There's not competitive pressure on that. I'm wondering if you see that in your reporting that this is a great idea and everyone knows that in theory there should be a USB for
home stuff or a Wi-Fi for home stuff. This big standard that everyone agrees on that no one messes with too much that everyone can trust and that is a great idea in theory. And then the reality is there's not actually any competitive pressure to use it because no one's switching because of it. No consumer actually can see it or care about it. I think you're right. In my world the people I talk to are all super excited about it and they see this as the future but I feel like the next
levels up in their companies are really not that interested. I think there was a push where all of these companies thought okay matter is something we need to do because it will help grow the smart home and that will help our bottom line in whichever way we're involved in the smart home. But ultimately the competitive pressure hasn't arrived because the smart home still is a
very niche space. I think what is going to change and I think what's probably going to help push the platforms towards making and adopting these changes is the introduction of appliances. We're going from smart lights and sensors to dishwasher washing machines ovens, cooktops, you know big appliances, HVAC systems that are in everyone's homes and that those manufacturers are actually going to push connectivity because actually it benefits them significantly.
It makes it a lot easier for things like service and repair and then there's also the data side. I do think we're going to see a push once a lot of the big companies start producing devices. So it's a chicken and egg situation. Once there are matter devices out there we will see the platforms moving more quickly to adopt support because they'll be more pressure. But we're in a moment of stasis right now and consumer pressure is important there too. I think we need to say this is what we
want. We need to push for it because we don't want to rely solely on the cloud to run our homes. This is one of the biggest arguments I see against the smart home today is the cloud is great but it can't be the only way your device connects to your home matter helps resolve that problem because it's a local protocol so even if the company goes out of business you're still going to be able to control your smart devices using the platforms that are compatible with matter.
Yeah we just bought a new LG washer and dryer which does not have matter they're supposed to
been have they don't and first of all they are just always talking to the network. I don't know what they're doing they're just banging away just sending packets left or right I don't know why some of those packets are notifications to me that the washer is done which is not useful and I need to turn them off but even when I want to control them back my phone doesn't actually talk to it it bounces up to LG's cloud and then back down to my house which just seems inherently silly to me
and you're saying matter would make my phone talk directly to that appliance. Exactly yes because it would all work on your local network. Although just to make things more complicated and because this is about standards and there's always politics and standards there is a competing standard the home connectivity alliance which is all appliance manufacturers and that's all cloud-based.
They say that there's tandem harmony between the two standards but for the consumers matter I think is the one that I would champion because matter will help you have more control over your devices locally and subsequently more control over your data and also reassure you that your devices are going to continue to work in the way you're expecting them to and not have a negative
change or degradation over time. This is one of the reasons I think we've really struggled to see the smart home take off is because of this confusion and this concern and this is where you know a standard-like matter and you said it earlier you know it is a Wi-Fi for the smart home it's a
Bluetooth for the smart home that's exactly what it is and that is what ultimately the connectivity standards alliance which overseas matter is trying to accomplish matter isn't or shouldn't be the story matter is the connective tissue the interoperability but this is something that we really need to make the smart home work. We're now in a position where I really think it's up to the platforms and the manufacturers to step up and say okay we decided to do this we're going to
follow three. Well the good news is we're in OS launch season right Apple is going to have some versions of iOS shortly at wdc Google is going to have IO where we're going to see Android in
the next few weeks so hopefully there's some movement there. There's another piece that puzzle I want to focus on for just a second it's where the smart home software actually lives a lot of the big companies seem to think there should be some point of centralization for Apple and HomeKit for Samsung smart things Google has Google home but ultimately the smarts have to happen
somewhere. Someone has to write some code to tell your devices how to operate the interact that code needs to live somewhere it needs to run somewhere someone has to fix it when it breaks unless the issue security updates we're basically saying there should be a server somewhere
running your house. Maybe that server is more abstract it's running in a cloud. Maybe it's more distributed it's running all the devices in your house that sort of how Apple's home kit works but maybe it should just be a server a computer in your basement it's running the code that operates
your smart home. There's a lot of different ways to handle it and all of these approaches are out in the market but the big platforms have not done a good job of making it clear where all the software is running and why they're competing visions for how that software is organized or structured.
When we go back to this beginning of the smart home with the original smart things and the revolve hub and wink this was when we all started to take the smart home the DIY smart home take some interest in it and that was all hub based so we had these little white boxes with multiple
radios in but for some reason we could never have one little white box with all the radios in there was always one missing you know you could still never have everything talk to each other and then so the hubs went away because the big platforms came in and we're like hmm we don't
need to do this with hubs we can do this all in the cloud and we can make all these devices talk to each other and interesting factoid Samsung bought smart things Google bought revolve Amazon launched Alexa and Apple launched home kit all in the same year so that all happened in 2014
so that was the beginning of this new smart home the DIY smart home and what happened then is you know wow this is so much easier you don't have the consumers don't have to buy this little hub you can just use your phone to control everything but then the lag and the control issues and not
everything working with each other and it all became something of a confusing mess and that's how we sort of ended up with matter coming in to kind of fix it all and bring us back to the idea of a hub which is essentially what matter is doing but in a different name because the word smart
home hub became like a dirty word no one wants hubs because they're expensive and confusing so I disagree with you in a small way right which is if I could just buy a smart home product for my basement that was an actual product with an interface and it's where everything connected to
and I could log into it and open it and see it and when it broke I could unplug it and plug it back in and I think that would be good right like I think it would conceptually be simpler than these weird it's half on your phone half on your Alexa like where's the computer is like a real
question I think most people don't know the answer to and the concept of the smart home and now right there's this project called home assistant that you've been covering they're going from kind of a hobbyist group to being more of a real foundation they are selling a product like this
called the home assistant green it seems like there's some real action there yes for sure and so yeah we're coming back to hubs essentially it's what happening there is a problem with hubs I agree with you that having one computer running your smart home sounds like the ideal but the problem is
when that computer dies your your home dies so that is a bit of a failure point and this is one of the areas of matter and thread that is trying to solve that issue where you have multiple devices in your home that are all essentially running the computer matter controllers and thread border
routers but we're not at a point yet where you can reliably run your home with matter controllers and thread border routers for a number of reasons that I have written extensively about politics probably being one of them I think matter will get there and I think thread will get there
but right now that's leaving a big sort of open space for new platforms to come in and say look we have a solution that's going to work for you right now today and we'll work with matter and thread in the future and because I get emails constantly from readers saying you know I want to set up a
smart home or I'm moving to a smart home or I want to expand my smart home do I have to wait for a matter to be here and be ready before I can do anything and no one wants to tell someone you can't buy any gadgets I mean that's just not something that we do there are solutions today that mean you can use your smart home and devices today but be set up for the future when matter finally gets us act together and that's
where home assistant and as you mentioned the home assistant green really comes in so home assistant is a smart home platform like apple home or google home and what's exciting about it is it's open source and it also has a very strong focus on local control and privacy but traditionally home
assistant has been complicated to get started with you need to run a home assistant server on a Raspberry Pi or a variety of hardware options and while you can still do that now there's actually an easier solution and you can pick up a home assistant green which they're about to start selling
on amazon for $99 which is a big shift for the company and the green is a one stop shop for home assistant it's a smart home hub that comes with the OS pre installed just making it easier to set up and get running home assistant is an open source community driven smart home platform that really made
its name because it's one of the few systems that everything works with but not everything works very well which is always one of these issues with the smart home because of this interoperability problem so home assistant just launched the open home foundation which is a way of separating its business model from its ethics and ideals so the open home foundation is actually an organization that is consumer advocate in the smart home it's looking to try and help push forward better smart home
products that work locally in your home so you don't have the issues that we were talking about earlier about cloud control that they have a lot of really interesting lofty ideals but the device itself the home assistant green and the home assistant platform is a very powerful smart home platform
probably a little too powerful for most people and it can be really complicated to set up devices in home assistant but with these updates to matter I think we'll see home assistant shift more into the mainstream because it will be easier to set up devices in home assistant that
is today and home assistant will become a matter controller and you need a matter controller from the platform you want to use in order to set up and control matter devices I know that's a lot of matter and a lot of control but basically a matter controller is like a hub they just didn't want
to call it a hub there are other platforms that are also doing this a carer which is a smart home company that a lot of listeners might be familiar with they make sensors and cameras and smart lights very inexpensive they've worked with Apple Home for years and a carer has just released last week
it's own matter controller slash thread border router so you don't necessarily have to use Apple Home or Amazon Alexa or Google Home or Samsung smart things because this open source matter smart home standard anyone can use you don't have to be one of the big tech companies so all
of these platforms whether it's home assistant or habitat or home bridge they're all using a single hub to control and communicate with your devices so we're definitely seeing a shift back toward the hub idea especially because of local control and the security and privacy it offers you versus
relying entirely on the cloud we need to take another quick break when we're back and Jen and I get into what the future of the smart home might look like once upon a time in America there was no such thing as all you can eat shrimp and then the world
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we're back with verge smart home reviewer Jen toy to talk about where the smart home is headed next so we've talked about matter it's changed recently but how much further it still needs to go and we've touched on this pendulum swing between hubs and giving consumers more control over what their smart home looks like and how these devices should actually talk to each other home assistant is one version of this it's a fascinating project because of that foundation you mentioned and because
it started as this hobbyist project that's now evolved into something much more legitimate and stable you said maybe it's a little too powerful i think that is a reflection of the fact that it was built by enthusiasts for enthusiasts like it can just do everything it is a computer and you can program it you can program your smart home like a computer if you use home assistant i know people who spend their weekends just write in code for their home assistant setups yes
and that's great the so those people that's like a wonderful way i have been that person and we'll get to why i'm no longer that person in a second but the open home foundation which is going to run home assistant they just started and their mission statement is very idealistic right the mission statement i'm just going to quote is to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer a counterbalance to big tech influence in the smart home by focusing on privacy choice and sustainability
for smart home users how does that square with also when you buy whatever cheap cloud connected gadget we will control it because the goal is to control everything right like that there's a real tension there that the platform might respect to you but all this hardware you're
deploying around your house it might just talk to the network for no reason so actually what's also quite new for home assistant is it also has a works with program which is something you might be familiar with if you've ever bought any smart home device that says works with Alexa or works with
Google basically it's saying this device will work with your platform well and we have guaranteed that this will work on your platform but home assistant uniquely is saying that it will not allow any device that only relies on the cloud to carry its works with labels so it will work with
home assistant even if it works with the cloud it has to have a local connection to get that label it can work via the cloud but it also has to have a local control element because yeah you're right there's a tension there that these devices have the potential if they're sitting in our homes
as I mentioned before you know stop working not work the way you expect them to change the way they work what it's doing though is it's putting the onus on the user so if you choose to put a device in your home that is relying on the cloud you need to understand the risk there what matter
and what home assistant does today is all works locally every device that works with matter is a local device except for you know if you choose to opt for a device that talks the cloud talking to the cloud is not a bad thing I just want to make that clear there are lots of benefits
of talking to the cloud but unfortunately there are also downsides you just have to be aware it's hard for the consumer to sort of understand what they're taking on every time you buy a device like that but then you get the advantages like for instance when my smart thermostat knows it's
going to be really cold tomorrow and it starts heating up earlier to keep me warmer it's a struggle I agree it's going to take a while to work through this because right now it's very much a hobbyist platform and as it tries to appeal to a larger audience there's going to be some tension
one of the reasons that I moved away from home assistant to another kind of community project called home bridge was that you know my wife my child they look at their phones they look at their iOS devices and so if you want to expose the control of the smart home to them
it had better be on their phone that's where it is and that's just the reality of the situation like if there's not a tile in control center on my wife's phone she is not going to use it no and once that once once I came to that realization about seven years into our marriage I was like
okay I'm going to I'm just going to accept this I was like okay I'm just going to move everything to home kit I'm going to move everything to Apple's platform and home bridge another community project just lets you do that right just middle where it sits in your house I always call it a
tomagotchi because it's finicky and you gotta be at a feed of every couple days but it's basically a little Linux computer running on a Raspberry Pi and it just bridges everything into the tiles in control center and that feels like one like I gave up like I turned my back on this idea of
as like brilliant smart home running this custom platform basement but two it also feels like a very important reality for everyone we'll just end where we started which is you saying this has to be for everyone in the house and if it's not in that default interface on whatever phone you have
or it's not on the you know easily accessible from your Alexa screen or your Google Home screen on your hub devices there your smart displays it might just go ignored and that feels like the hardest part of this right is to to make that interface so pervasive it's the promise
but at the end of the day it does seem still pretty gated by what the big platforms are going to allow you to do very much so yes and the big platforms are definitely going for the you know the widest common denominator they're not interested in really appealing to the hobbyists and the enthusiasts
which is where I think platforms like home assistant and home bridge will always have a place and for the tech enthusiasts they really do offer a lot that you you just cannot get with the main for platform Samsung smart things to some extent has more control smart things is by the way I
just need to say this very clearly smart things is some of the most chaotic software I've ever used in my entire life is that because you're trying to use it with the TV yeah it's I have frame TVs there but smart things is like a web based platform and some news you open the app and it just
doesn't show up yeah that's weird downloading drivers as it goes yeah it's just a deeply weird platform yeah well and because it it did what home assistant is trying to do 10 years ago which is moved from being an open source hobbyist enthusiast community to a mainstream platform it had the
power of Samsung behind it to do that it still has some really great deep dive tools and automations you can do but then you also just can't get it to turn your TV on which you should do I agree um but yes ultimately I think what I've been seeing is a shift of the big smart home
platforms towards the local control because that's what matter is bringing so I think that these hubs like home assistant and home bridge and habitat and homies another one and a carer I think they're actually providing almost a roadmap for where I think we'll end up seeing the big platforms going
because everyone will need a matter controller to control matter devices and I think those matter controllers which right now I think's like your Apple TV and your Google Nest hubs I think we're going to see those devices get more powerful and be able to do more in your home and actually become
hubs again they started out by not being hubs and I think eventually we're going to go full circle and they're going to become Asmart Home hubs and we'll have multiple of them in the home so that when one fails Asmart homes will still work and we will all love Asmart homes eventually. I feel like this big question of I'm going to turn my house to a computer but I don't quite know
where that computer is or who's running it or who's responsible for managing it. There are some attempts at solutions here right you you have the platforms on the major smartphones and from Amazon you have things like Home Assistant you have these protocols that are developing like a matter but without solving that first problem just making that it conceptually easy to understand what is happening it feels like there's going to be a roadblock to mass adoption for quite a while.
Is the industry working on that do you see that in your reporting or is it just one foot in front of the other? No I do not think the industry is working on that but I do think they should be I think right now they are in this one foot in front of the other stage because there's this push to make
people understand the benefits of the smart home. I don't think there has been anywhere near enough attention paid to explaining to people how it's actually working in your home and how you can control it because troubleshooting the smart home right now matter thread home kit any of them
is impossible and the idea behind it I think is to try and make it user friendly and easy so that you don't have to worry about being a cis admin for your house but also means that when it breaks you're stuck and then you just throw up your hands and say I'm done I'm getting done lights and
you know a key again so we need more transparency around that people aren't stupid people don't know what they're doing people are you know are used to computers and phones and understanding how these devices work so yes I agree we need much more transparency there we need the tools to be
able to you know control understand how the computers in our homes are working but ultimately if we get to the point where you actually make this all work seamlessly work locally so not relying on the cloud we shouldn't be running into those problems as much and then we shouldn't have to worry
just as just as seamless as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is today the smart home will be one day all right well have you back when that happens you let me know uh gent thanks so much for coming to your color this was great we could keep talking about this for many more hours I'm sure but thank you so
much for having me thanks again to Jen to me for joining us at decoder because you can tell I love talking to Jen about smart home stuff I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did if you've thought about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of on decoder I can email us at decoder at the
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podcast decoder's production the verge and part of the box media podcast network today's episode was produced by Kate Cox Nick stat it was edited by Kelly Wright super rising producer as Liam James the decoder music is my breakfast we'll see you next time