HomeTech.fm - Episode 483 - Matter 1.3

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

On this week's show: We talk about the latest in home technology news and sit down with Daneal Moneta, chair of the Matter Marketing and Product Work Group, to discuss the current state of Matter and what's new in version 1.3.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 24th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, soil motion sensors, maybe? I don't know. Let's talk about that.

Let's get that out of the way. Out of the way? Are those matter matter compatible there's just so much news tonight it's gonna be a long show so you know get comfortable get some snacks and just enjoy it make a cuppa as they say all right uh yeah soil motion sensor this is a new one uh where did this come from the the hub i thought somebody posted this in the hub so david sent me this in the hub you know because we're constantly going back and forth about our lawns um he's a lawn nut more than i am actually and i was a big fan of the eco wit um wh51 soil moisture sensors because they worked really well but those are the ones you know if you've been following us this long they would would stick out of the ground. And then you'd see these little green things,

they had a little flashing light on them, which I covered up with a sticker. But, you know, I went through the season, stepping on a few, broke a few. I have a few backups still. But then he pointed out a new version of it, that EcoWit release called the WH-51L. And this one is actually the sensor you bury in the ground that has a one meter long cable that you can run to the side and then you can mount the little transmitter box on like a wall or something. So now you can mow your lawn, you can, you know, not worry about stepping on it, all sorts of things. These look great. I'm going to be ordering a few once they're available. I can't find them, but yeah, they overcome the whole sticking out of the ground thing pretty nicely.

I wish the cable was a little longer, but you know what? If I get one, I'm going to cut that cable and see what wires are in there and see if I can maybe extend it so I can get, you know, more into the lawn and see if that works. But yep, I love them. It says these are about $50 US a piece. Oh man.

And it looks like you would be, yeah, they're $50. And supposedly they'll come out May 27, so not too much longer. And it looks like from the picture, you obviously won't know until you get a cabin, but it looks like you can actually just replace the lead. And so maybe you can actually extend it or buy extensions or something at some point. That would be awesome. Because, I mean, whenever you're doing this, you want to make sure it sure it's waterproof obviously and there's not a lot of good ways to do that and keep it short or keep it small if you're going to extend it so hopefully they just sell extension cables or something well i will be buying a few and reporting back later in the season when i

start opening up all my you know irrigation system and stuff like that because we're now getting into the spring summertime here. Yeah, I love EcoWit. They're great. I'm glad you turned me on to them. Yeah. You're going to get me caught into this one. Although I'm not mowing my grass.

I'm refusing to until they're done working on the construction stuff out front. I think they're done, but I'm still not mowing my lawn. So it's like really tall in places right now. I've had quite a bit of rain and it's not green everywhere, but it's growing. I think that's half the battle, right? Yeah. Probably all that iguana poop. Probably.

Probably. I don't know what's wrong with it. There's something, there's like stretches of the grass. My wife's like, why don't you turn the water on? And I'm like, well, it does water in those sections. It's just still brown. I don't know why. Maybe I need to get some of these soil motions and moisture.

Since I'm not mowing it on, I may as well just pick some of these up and plug them in and see what it tells me. There go yeah bam sold i'm getting you hooked now yep yep order 10 yeah send us a couple crazy all right well i'll give it a try i've been staring at this stuff for a while so we'll see you'll need a little gateway too so you know the easiest way is you get the little gateway but the gateway is cheap i, you can get the gateway for like 30 bucks or something like that. Right. And that just ties into Home Assistant. And of all the tests, that has been one of the best ways to get the signaling because

it just picks up the signal so much better than everything else I've done. Hmm. What gateway is that? Console? No, no. Just it's a little gray box with an antenna on it. LAN WAN gateway. I think that is. Yep. Yep. Yep it's a little gray box with an antenna on it. Lan Wan Gateway, I think. Yep.

Yep. Yep. I see. $31 or $29. One of the two. Yep. Okay. Yeah, not bad.

Maybe I'll do something like that. I did the old turn on the thing with the cups for your sprinkler test the other day. And it was mostly even. So I know it's getting water in those sections. It's just not. The grass isn't turning green. I think the grass is dead there for whatever reason. So, oh well.

Throw down a little extra seed, you know. Throw down some soil and turn on your sprinkler and just let it go. All right. Well, we've got a big show tonight. Let's see. We've got Daniel Mineta from the Matter Working Group on tonight. We're going to have an interview with him. Sit down and chat a little bit about all the things going on in Matter.

Now that they've got 1.3 coming out. So that's a little teaser. But first, we've got a bunch of Home Tech headlines. So what do you guys say we jump into those? Let's do it. First up, a couple of cool updates. ADT, the new ADT Plus Home Security System, is going to integrate the Google Nest camera facial recognition feature.

And it enables a thing they're calling Trusted Neighbor, a feature that grants temporary access to trusted individuals when you're away. The system includes new hardware and software. It can automatically disarm using facial recognition to allow somebody that you have registered, I guess, on the camera there into your house while you're gone that's that's not a bad idea no no keys no like pin code number things to pop in and mess up on because the locks are hard to push buttons in i don't know it's not a bad idea a pretty cool idea i you could kind of do something like this and if you had a home automation system today with like blue iris and stuff but i always found facial how um oh this is making it easy though gavin this is yeah i know plug and play but how um how reliable is the face what is blue iris i've never heard of it you guys you noobs how reliable is facial recognition though

you know because i see it pick up a lot of things wrong all the time or it doesn't recognize somebody or something like that but you know it's a cool feature i'd rather just have something like a code that i can give my neighbor and let them in the house with a smart door lock yeah yeah you don't want to walk it up at the wrong time and then like oh there's my neighbors in my house yeah digging in the fridge you know that kind of thing so i'm hungry i'm looking at my fridge there all right uh a new product from aquara aquara uh new smart outlet uh they've got a wall out eight wall outlet h2 it's a smart outlet for european markets starting at 49 euro um this outlet can monitor real-time power usage and trigger automations based on that, and it activates nighttime scene.

It can detect when your phone charging exceeds 10 watts. It operates on Zigbee 3.0 and can integrate with various smart home platforms. Nice little product coming out. I suppose we'll see. It says we'll be available in select markets, select countries, European countries, May 30th. I suspect we'll see this over here eventually, right? Yeah. Well, hopefully a new design at least, you know. Well, yeah, you can't use the same. european countries may 30th yep um i suspect we'll see this over here eventually right yeah well hopefully a new design at least you know well yeah you can't use the same exactly and you know what usually i just don't care about the european news but ever since we started doing this sticker

call out you know like seeing how many european people listen to the show i love you all i'm gonna start gathering more european news because i feel your pain when it comes to trying to get, you know, products and stuff like that. So this is great. Aquara has, you know, really stepped it up recently. Power monitoring is a great thing, especially in Europe where I think power is really expensive over there. Yeah. So, you know, like knowing how much power things are drawing is going to be very valuable. You'll probably make money back just from this, you know,

than we would over here. But that's great to see Acquara, you know, branching out and come out with some new stuff for you guys. It's got little features in it that, here's one example. It can turn off the jacks as soon as the power dips below a user-defined load of zero watts to two watts for over 30 minutes. So if you've got something in there, it's one of those little, what do they call them, vampire got ghost uh ghost circuits yeah something like

that yeah or it just kind of leeches the power you should have a leech circuit at least the power off you know your house it's just like running a charger that's no longer charging the battery it can just kick off it's a great idea good job akara Aqara. Yep. More stuff like this. Xiaomi also is revealing. Now, this is cool. This is cool. It's the Xiaomi People's Presence Sensor. It's an interesting name to it. Now, this is kind of like the Aqara sensor, right?

But this one is a battery-operated one, and it looks adorable. It absolutely, like, it's a little mushroom-looking thing that you can set on your countertop, and it can detect human presence when individuals are stationary, as long as there is consistent lighting, it says. That's weird. And it offers a wide detection angle of 130 degrees. So I'm liking this.

This is pretty cool. It works on a CR2450 button battery, lasting up to three years. Count me in. This is way more battery life than I thought liking this. This is pretty cool. It works on a CR2450 button battery lasting up to three years. Count me in. This is way more battery life than I thought, honestly. I would be fine with like one to two years. Yeah, I'm fine with one year, you know. And it's not actually a countertop one. I think that's just the picture because the other pictures show it wall mounted and stuff, right?

And again, it's another step towards what i really want is a battery-powered millimeter wave sensor so they're coming um they're coming out they call it what do they call it low power millimeter wave radar um so it's just a matter of time before we get there where battery-powered really good you know millimeter wave sensors and that's what i'm looking forward to this says it's a quote low power millimeter wave radar yeah um so yeah six meter range static detection range of four meters and yeah i think you're right because it has like a breakdown with some you know chinese writing on it that i can't read but it's pointing to the sensors that are facing out of what looked to be the top part of that round section. And yeah, I think you're right.

That's going to have to be. Ah. Yes. That's less. I really liked it. It looked just sitting there. I could set that on the end table or something. No one would know it was there, but it would detect, you know, people in the room.

Oh, that would be great. But no, it's got to be wall mounted. The only other thing I saw about this, and they don't mention this at all, and somebody pointed it out, that it may be Bluetooth only. Right? It's not ZigBee or anything that I would expect from them, but it may just be Bluetooth only. So when it comes out, I'm sure we'll get the reviews, and I'll probably grab one if I can and see how well it works. Yeah, pulling a switch by just going Bluetooth for battery life, and then just send it right to the hub, and we're able to do everything.

Yeah, solves the problem. All right, well, speaking of problems, Comcast, cable TV company here in the States, is launching a new streaming bundle called Stream Saver that includes Peacock, Apple TV+, Netflix, for subscribers of its cable TV or broadband services. The bundle aims to offer these services at a reduced price compared to individual,

individual subscriptions and Comcast is hoping that this bundling strategy will help retain subscribers and compete in the streaming market. Uh, it's like, they're redoing cable again, guys. Like why, why are they,

why? But this is nothing. Honestly, to me, this is nothing new because, new because I remember on my Rogers bill, I would always see at the bottom of the bill or offers, they would say, you get this package and we'll include Netflix and Disney and whatever. They were already bundling it in to the cable package, which was really weird too, right? So I think we expected this at some point.

Yeah, it says that they've lost 487,000 cable TV subscribers in the first quarter of 2024 with broadband subscriber base also decreasing. Wonder where they're going. Maybe they can increase, I don't know, their customer service or the speed of their internet where they don't have to find alternatives. I don't know something crazy like that Comcast. Maybe you can do that. Uh, Peacock also has incurred significant losses. So nobody, people are kind of watching that occasionally and then not watching it anymore.

So yeah, they're having problems. And so the idea is just to bundle in all of these, um, channels together and sell it under one package. I'm using air quotes for all this because it's basically just cable TV. That's what the innovation is. They've innovated cable TV to include streaming services. Better product, maybe.

Maybe. Just an idea. Just an idea, Comcast. Just an idea. No, why would you want that? Comcast is the only company I dislike more than Spectrum. So yeah, they're pretty bad. And BreezeLine.

And Sonos. We'll get to that though. Google launches a new home API here, access for its Google Home platform. This is actually cool. It allows developers to create smart solutions for users within the apps by tapping into Google's automation engine.

These new home API support Matter and works with Google Home devices, enabling developers to integrate Google Home devices and automations back into their apps for iOS and Android. This is actually pretty cool. So partners that are working with Google Home can, now that they have these APIs, they can like, there's another story from Eve.

It talks about their upcoming Android app that we've been hearing about this for a while like he was making an android app but it's been slow slow space now they're saying oh it's on turbocharged now that we have these apis we can get right in there and port our app over the eve app right over to google home um just like we have over in ios so i i don know. I think this is great. The more APIs, the better. I am pro API, not pro cable, cable company. No, not that, but pro API. Yeah, I'm pro cable. I mean, API too.

Yeah, APIs are good. Now, honestly, this is really cool just because compatibility within the smart home system is the biggest hurdle for most of these devices. And you can buy a really cool, you know, smart outlet or a light switch or whatever it is now. But if it doesn't work with other stuff, then it doesn't matter. You know, and it just it there's no point in having it, you could just buy anything else. And so somebody

leveraging this to bring their product just like Eve is to a lot of new a lot of new users. I mean, that's what you want, you want to be able to see this access. So this is really cool for Google to do. Let's just hope it stays around. Pending a public release of the new Google Home API is coming up this fall, but we'll see as long as they don't kill it, like you said. Yeah, cool, cool. Alright, let's talk about who matters this week.

Tado? Tado? I don't know how you say it. Tado? You say Tado? I say Tado. Tado. Alright, there we go. This sounds fun, you know? Tadoo has introduced the Tado do x smart heating range that integrates with matter smart home protocol and operates on a thread mesh mesh network system includes a thermostat x the smart radio thermos radiator thermostat x and the wireless temperature sensor x i don't know why they're gonna put x's on the end of these things i'm gonna just pretend everything has an x on it in the rest of the story uh the heat pump optimizer and uh they have an optional bridge which is also called a bridge x there you

go whatever uh it serves as a thread border router and to connect everything together so they've got a nice little platform uh here uh full matter platform that they're launching and uh it's compatible with all the all the ones we just talked about google home amazon apple home all those assistants uh home assistant i guess too right matter so not not so bad good job to do to do this is great i um i love seeing new matter products it's just i love seeing the they don't look bad either yeah and i love seeing the growth i love seeing the expansion you know like matter is now taking off a lot faster i'm just happy it matters you know and knowing that daniel listens to this show you know now i feel like he really listens to this show you know can't say anything bad about matter you can't say nothing

about matter but daniel get get get your pen, get your pen and pad out right now. I'm going to make a little suggestion. Can you push the various platforms to give us something like bindings or associations? Like let them, you know, like that will be my, when that comes, I'll be really switching things over to matter once I get some of that, you know. So I'm just throwing that out there. I know he's listening. He's probably writing it down right now. He's going to be like, I'll make a few calls, you know?

You're such an early adopter, Gavin. I'm an influencer. I'm influencing Matter changing. It's on the, living on the edge, living on the edge. Yeah. Pretty good prices here. Thermostat, bridge kit, basically, to get you started. 199 euro.

The smart thermostats, 134 euro. Smart radio. Why do I keep saying radio? Radiator thermostat with the bridge starter kit, 159. Just the radiator thermostat, 99. And if you want a quattro pack, which I'm guessing is four, that is $369. Wireless temperature sensor, $99. That's just quite a bit.

And then a heat pump optimizer, $249. And the bridge by itself, $69. So not bad. It's a whole ecosystem. So 100 euros, what? 110 US dollars, I think? Actually, so I just did the Canadian conversion. How much is like an Ecobee thermostat up there, Gavin? Like the premium. Oh, the premium Ecobee, I got to take out a loan for.

Well, that was a surprise. And they're a Canadian company too, so that's even worse. Yeah, but they're owned by an American company now. Americans ruin everything. Jeez, where do I even buy it from? Because this thermostat is 199 euros. The one we were just talking about, the Tadu. It's 294 Canadian. So I'm interested in how that stacks up against other thermostats up there. I think we've learned that Canada just is like, there's a premium markup to live there.

The premium. Okay. So the premium smart thermostat premium with smart sensor and air quality monitor, blah, blah, blah. 329. Yeah. Yeah. That's basically the same, blah, blah, blah. $329. Yeah, well, yeah. That's basically the same, similar cost as Ecobee premium for you then. Or the enhanced is $249, or you can get the light with $198 for $198. All right.

Canada, Texas. Like, you may as well just live in Hawaii. Do you guys feel my pain here? I don't. Everything's so so cheap and i walk outside oil just flowing from my yard and you don't want me to get into my 3d printer rent right now like wait let's save that for the projects i'll start off the red section with my 3d printer rent first and then you know we'll go from there oh wait they have a whole rant section we're gonna cancel that for mine so they might as well hear what you have to say.

All right, well, Home Assistant Matters this week. There is a new Matter update on Home Assistant. They are up to Matter version 1.3. So, what, probably the first hub to integrate with 1.3, right? Really fast, actually. Yeah, it was almost like I just heard about 1.3, and then I got an update to my Home Assistant with 1.3, right? And I know they're very popular with Matter, and a lot of people are using them to test Matter products on. So that's probably why Home Assistant will always be on the latest version of Matter. Yeah, it looks like it's in beta, too.

So maybe. It's always in beta. Like, Home Assistant is beta, you know? I'll just tell you. There you go. Well, all right. Well, as long as it's in beta, they don't have to worry about breaking things at all. So, there you go.

You've been warned. All right. Well, I mean, there are rant sections here. I don't know if you want to talk about ranting about your 3D printer before we let TJ just take over the show. This is a quick one, but just so you guys feel my pain, I ordered my 3D printer in February. I was waiting for all the parts to become available, and then they finally shipped it. It took about a week to get here, and they shipped it via FedEx. But yeah, before FedEx would deliver it to me, they're like, oh no, you owe us some money.

You owe us duties. You owe us duties. You owe us taxes. So basically, whatever I paid for the printer, I had to pay another $400 just for them to drop it off at my door for me. Holy cow. You know, that's how we get hurt up here when it comes to duties and taxes and stuff like that. Like, it was another $400. And, you know, at that point point i've waited so long the printers in the city i had to pay it it's like what what option do i have like they told us before i ordered

this that you know like but nope they don't care wherever it's coming from it's just when the canada gets at their border they're like ah well let's get some money from this gavin guy that's crazy i would have drove i would have driven up to you for $400, Gavin. I would have hand-delivered it. Just that much. On that note, I just want to remind our listeners about our Patreon. If you go to home tech.com. Okay, that's the end of my rant.

I'm done. I'm going to get those filament funds in. I feel better now. This is a safe place. That's crazy. It is. That is nuts. Americans would literally burn every building down if we had to do that.

Yeah. Instead, we just go broke paying for our healthcare. We don't care about healthcare, but if I couldn't get my cheap stuff from China, there would be hell in the streets. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Off to you, TJ.

All right. Well, Sonos has finally released their Ace Wireless over-the-ear active noise-canceling headphones priced at $449. Or what did we discover? $500 and something Canadian? $599 Canadian. Yeah. I don't even know if that includes duties and taxes and stuff. Probably not.

Don't find out. You have to buy it from a store that shows you off. I'm going to find out anyway. It's not worth it all right competes uh clearly competing with apple and bose high-end headphones the headphones offer all-day comfort with slim design memory phone vegan leather and a stainless steel construction they come with a travel case made from 75 plastic bottles and have wireless connectivity with bluetooth 5.4 uh custom designed 40 millimeter dynamic drivers to support spatial audio um tj since you're getting these uh what are you excited about go get them oh i have some

bad news i'm not getting these um they they look basically just like i thought they would like and kind of what the leaks were showing um i think the verge basically has an insider at this point i think it's just bad suspense uh but they they look like the leaks uh they look like similar to airpods and bows i mean there's nothing remarkable about the design itself i think it when it has 3.5 millimeter and usbc or does it just have usbc to 3.5 i don't even know it's got it's got some ports though so you don't have to just use it with bluetooth but honestly the thing that i don't understand these are bluetooth only no wi-fi so they they have wi-fi only if you're going to use them with cinema mode and the only sonos product these work with i can use my my play bar right uh no well you definitely can't use your play bar come on upgrade uh you could only use your sonos arc seth so if you have a 900 sound

bar you could pair these headphones to that and that's it nothing else you can't pair it to the beam the beam to the ray uh you know sonos ones anything else um which i don't understand i thought they would just be like understand I thought they would just be like a separate zone they would just be like a Sonos speaker in your ear like that that seems like the most common sense solution for Sonos which makes whole house audio products but well it's cool like I have my Android phone and I'll surely be able to use that with my Android phone right oh well actually no Seth it's not compatible with Android at all right now so you can't if you have android which sonos has always snubbed android so i mean that's not really enough yeah um but yeah it's just like it's such a weird product because it's like well okay

so they're they're bluetooth only and they only work the sonos arc like you've just cut down your market drastically on these and like there wasn't going to be like i'm sure they'll sell like tens if not hundreds of thousands of these just because that's what smart home products do and stuff no i'm assuming like tens of thousands i don't know like hundreds of thousands i think is pushing it but yeah it's just it's so weird and like they've got like a 30 hour battery life with bluetooth and so the only thing i can think of is that the wi-fi just drained the battery too much but these are supposed to be worn at home, right? And if I'm wearing them when I'm watching TV or whatever else, like I don't need them to last 30 hours, they could last like

15 hours. And, you know, that could be like two long days or, you know, five shorter days over the span of a week. So I don't know, the battery thing doesn't seem to be that big of an issue it's kind of weird um it's just i this is a total miss i think i mean and it wasn't a lot of people were talking crap about it anyway and now it's like oh well kind of deserve that one didn't you sonos at least they didn't break their app to release this and early yeah that still wasn't working right and and not to mention like the airpod what are thePod Max? Those are the big ones that these would compete with. They're more expensive, but they're on sale right now for what? For $499.

$499. Which means that the version, the next version of those are coming out, right? Any day. Like Apple stuff doesn't go on sale anytime soon until it's upgrade time. So man, these are going to have a, since they don't do anything more than regular Bluetooth head,

I don't see them selling these for a while. I don't know. Well, and it's like, why wouldn going to have a, since they don't do anything more than regular Bluetooth headphones, I don't see them selling these for a while. I don't know. Well, and it's like, why wouldn't you just buy, I mean, so Sonos already isn't known for having good Bluetooth products. Exactly, yeah. So you can look at the Roam, and the Roam has, everybody likes the Roam because it's small and portable and all that stuff. Nobody likes the price because it is expensive.

But everybody complains, mostly everybody complains about the Bluetooth issues that stuff nobody likes the price because it is expensive um but everybody complains mostly everybody complains about the bluetooth issues that they have in the speaker and if you look at the sonos subreddit or the forums or whatever everybody's complaining about the sonos room bluetooth and the fact that these are bluetooth only is like oof i don't know sonos uh i don't think nobody wants these um but ironically they did release the sonos room two today as well so they finally fixed the sonos roam 1 by just introducing a new one yeah i'd have to trust their bluetooth a little bit better from all the complaints i heard about that yeah to even consider these and then why

would i buy these if like there are other more established companies i don't know like i don't bose sony they are pot max just spend 50 more i mean just doesn't make sense yeah anything else because i mean the the advantage of the sonos is that basically it would just act as a separate zone but now that they're just bluetooth speakers you can literally just buy any bluetooth or bluetooth headphones you can literally just buy bluetooth headphones like there's not a lot of reasons to buy these unless you're looking for the cinema mode uh which is my i guess the only selling point yeah when you were going over your your your wi-fi conspiracy theories i i never honestly thought that was a thing that

was going to happen but what i did think they would do and they could do and i don't know why they can't do it and maybe it's just like a lawyer thing they have to work out with their lawyers people um is like why can't you treat the headphones exactly like you're talking about um pair them with a phone pair them with a bluetooth heck pair them with bluetooth that probably exists on the players too they probably have bluetooth radios on most of the players now uh the newer ones at least yes okay so pair them with that and then use the that output like control that output through the amp into the headphones as like another zone like so what you're talking about yeah like use the app as the zone for your headphones you're on the wi-fi your own home you're you can tell when you're close to your sonos system why can't they do that it seems like a no-brainer and that would that would be the exact

functionality that you're asking for treat these as a separate zone or you can flip them over fine they are regular old bluetooth headphones who cares what they have that nothing else has like the apple product does they have the ability to show up in the sonos uh app and be checked off as his own nothing else has that right now yeah yeah i what i what i enjoy is i was over on the dealer forums today uh yesterday and they were all like oh it's gonna sonos going to release this multi-channel rack mount amplifier that we've been dreaming of for years. And it's like, nope, not going to happen. No, stop it. So I was poking fun.

There was actually a Reddit post here that this guy wrote. He was a dealer for 10 years, platinum dealer for 10 years, because you've got to mention he's a platinum dealer. He's been asking for an outdoor rated soundbar for over 10 years. And he knows hundreds of dealers who want the same thing. You know, zero people that have asked for headphones. I know at least one person that's asked for a headphone. A soundbar sounds like a great idea outside. But yeah.

Yeah. I want TJ to buy the headphones, run them through their paces, answer all our questions, and you can return them after. Just rent them. Yeah, I probably will, honestly. Yeah, yeah, do it. just rent them yeah i probably will honestly yeah i have so many questions yeah one thing i think is kind of funny about this is you guys know uh sonos radio they're free and paid tier of music service that they have oh it'd be perfect for my headphones oh well guess what seth uh you can't actually listen to sonos radio with these headphones because you can't do that.

I guess hypothetically, if you were to play it on the Sonos Arc, you could do that. But why would you do that? So you can't even use these with Sonos' own radio streaming service. Considering all I have is beams in my house, too. They don't have support yet for the beam. So this won't work for me either. Just buy it. It'll come eventually.

Come on, CJ. Go get it. No, no. I'll leave it up to you. You got to answer all my questions, CJ. Just take one for the beam so this won't work for me either so just buy it i'll come on tj go get it no no i'll leave it up to you you gotta answer all my questions cj just take one for the team take take i mean you can buy a pair too for the team if you want to try them out good send me some of that patreon money i gotta gotta write up slide it over we are paying stickers what are you talking about oh man well what a mess uh of a month for sonos uh first a completely botched app update that yeah i don't know i heard it through the wind to the birds it's like uh we the people there we were like hey we tried to warn management that this isn't ready

and they didn't listen there you go patrick patrick spence if you're listening retire resign whatever you're not you're not right yeah i'm not i'm not seeing the well with sonos i am seeing it being run as the public company that it is right um so it is like it's there to make the money line move right and if the money line doesn't move they have to figure out inventive ways to do it and whether that's like random new products that no one ever wanted or interesting things that make investors oh well maybe they're doing something over there but like in the initially like sonos was like the whole goal behind it

was to bring like the best home home house audio system like in place like they were like the best experience good product like quality product that lasts forever i just don't see that anymore i just don't see that as part of the company they had this great reputation and just i don't know the product's still good it's still good hasn't really been updated very long i mean it it i guess it has been if they deleted sonos net right so i can't use that anymore uh yeah it's just there's a ton of questionable things going on and like i understand the money stuff but like sonos has always been known as a premium brand and it's just it when you do stuff like the the app update and the s1 s2 and the recycling program and all this stuff that just adds up over the years,

you're not a premium brand anymore. Yeah. And it's just like, that's why people bought you is because you are a premium brand. And once you ditch that, it's like, well, okay, so these other companies do whole house audio now, right? And so if you're in the Apple ecosystem- For a fraction of the price, mind you.

A fraction of the price. It's not as good, but it's a fraction of the price yeah and most people are not like i go into so many people's houses i can tell you right now guys most people do not care about cinema quality stuff no like there's there's a there's select people out there that want really good quality audio but most people are just going to use the tv speakers built into their tv like they're never going to add anything else and whenever they do it's going to be drastically better than once on the tv because whatever's on the tv now is just awful and so like your market is already super small and so you're you're just you're destroying it

you're sonos brand is getting destroyed and it's just like it's just so weird because it's over the silliest of things well uh at least we have a long road map ahead of us to look into according to um was the wall street journal uh they are looking into getting into the tv set top box market in-ear headphones that will closely rival apple airpods and um a large party speaker i don't know that sounds good yeah it's always wanted it's got to be it's got to have those it's got to be like the ones you buy from costco though with the with the with the leds around the woofer like oh and the stand and everything like it's like six foot tall no i mean you can you can get them they're like an amp and everything all in one it's like a bluetooth connected thing and it's got like two speakers

two wolfers maybe i don't know eight to ten inches and they have like these rgb lights that are around them that just you can't turn off because you need them for your quinceanera so yeah i i i think it has to look like that sonos you have to do that no rgb lights done yeah in the interview spence called the television market quote a very interesting for the long term and said he's quote open to driving further innovation in headphones there we go yeah see the only thing with a set-top box that makes sense would be like synchronized video uh but i after everything that's been happening i don't think sodas is gonna be able to deliver that at all so i don't think it's on their radar i mean it makes sense to me and you because we know that if you play a streaming channel on your set-top box you go to

the next streaming channel streaming you would try to play the same thing at the same time in the other room even if it's live tv it's not going to be delivered at the same time do those two boxes what do you think which market segment do you think is bigger people that want synchronized video across multiple tvs or people that want to use really expensive headphones with their really expensive soundbar it's oh man it's got to be about the same five people i think well zonos um i i there were there were people saying it's been inshittified i don't know if it fully has been inshittified i still think they make quality products like i'm not gonna be completely down i do like the app update i see where they're going they just should have

waited a month yeah the ui is good that's what stinks the most is like i really like the ui for the new app yeah in a month or so it'll be better and then maybe after that it'll be even better and then maybe sometime later in the future android will work with the headphones nah android users always get screwed it's ridiculous all right well um tj you done ranting are you you gotta go buy these you guys you guys understand where i'm coming from so we're we could i'll buy them but i'm returning them oh we've been hearing about it all day so it's like well the worst thing too is where like when the news actually came out i was actually working like i know gavin doesn't work because he's an it or whatever but i was up in an attic or something

when the news came out and i was like no this is the worst time for this news to come out you're trying to buy them and the website's crashing he's like i want to see the specs and what's hilarious is i told the i told nicole about him i was like oh my gosh they finally released the headphones she's like what about him and i told her and she was like that's so stupid and i was like man you guys missed out on two customers we were the only two customers you could have bought the dual pack yeah i woke up from my nap because i was working it i saw the news and i was all excited until i started you know seeing everybody and what they were complaining about and at that point i felt like going back to my nap, but I was already awake.

Already riled up, I'm sure. Yeah, exactly. To be fair, TJ, it is a state-mandated nap that he has to take because all those taxes have to go to something. We're paying for your health insurance. You better be healthy, nigga. You know what? When I was reading all these bad Redditdit posts though i was wondering how many of

these were um alternate uh logins for tj you know how many years i kept reading them in tj voice right and i kept thinking he could have written this no i don't think i have an active reddit account right now so it's not me it's not me on reddit at least you've been bad too many times uh good luck to Sonos. I mean, genuinely, like, good job with your un-shitification. I don't understand this. I don't understand how it was the most requested product. I didn't even think it was on anyone's radar until you mentioned it, what, towards the end of last year.

But evidently, it's been a theory amongst people who won't't be named and it was their most requested product of all time uh there we go moving on all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 483 all right pick of the week uh i was do going down a deep rabbit hole of things and ran across this adorable pick of the week. I was going down a deep rabbit hole of things and ran across this adorable video of the Cinco Midi Organizer. It is an Adult Swim, I don't know, fake advertisement thing that is amazing.

And if you ever dealt with computers in the 90s, this is exactly maybe late 80s. I'm not sure, but this is exactly how computers worked uh there is there's a midi i don't know if anybody remembers midi uh anymore but it was it was how we got our music from our computer back then when when it could just beep and boop and uh somebody decided hey maybe we can make those beeps and boops sound really really good and so they made this this thing called general midi and uh mid is still around. It's a great control protocol. Uh, you can use it for much more than, than just music and writing electronic music. You can use

it for controlling all sorts of fun stuff in the production world, but, uh, and, and sequencing and that kind of thing. But, uh, for the most part, it was designed to record the notes and intonation of electronic music starting way back. And it's a great protocol. I love it. I used to know all MIDI headers and everything, just the whole thing. But the, let's see, the Synco MIDI organizer, it goes through and there's a kid. He's like, Dad, can you play this song on the computer? And he's like, oh, how am I going to do this? Cause you know, back in the day,

finding your files on your, it was just, it was a nightmare. So there's this little box called the Cinco MIDI organizer and it can organize your MIDI songs by, uh, by alphabet. And you just have to type in this code that it, that, you know, you print it out on your dot nature spender and type in that code and it'll play the song. So it's a great little commercial and reminds me exactly of the hoops that we had to jump through in the early computing days. Now you just, you just go to your phone and you're like, Hey,

a Hey thing in the box here, play me some music. And it plays you an actual song. That's not beeps and boops, unless you like the beeps and boops music. I don't know. Is there a MIDI station on Spotify? There's gotta be.

Gotta be. Canyon dot MIDI. There you go. music i don't know is there a midi station on spotify there's gotta be gotta be canyon.midi there you go sometimes i don't realize how old you are when you talk about these things i'm like i think you're such a young guy and then you talk about something i'm like man you are like us old people like yeah i remember my first computer had two floppy disks the five and a quarter or you know five and a quarter yeah yeah do you Yeah, the five and a quarter, yeah. Yeah. Do you remember when you used to have to adjust all the jumpers just to put in a hard drive? Yes.

You know? That was a chore. They were un-PC labeled master and slave. Yes, I do remember that. Yes, yep. I don't think they can get away with that today's culture, but yeah, yeah, no, I was talking to my wife the other day about needing a floppy. Well, I was wearing a shirt that had a floppy drive on it, a three and a half inch floppy drive, which we still got a floppy drive, even though they were

hard. And she was like insisting that it was a hard drive. I'm like, nope, they called them a floppy drive. And the, the three, the, the, what is it? Three, three and a half inch, three and a half. Yeah. Five and a inch, three and a half. Yeah. Five and a quarter, three and a half. And my daughter was extremely confused is why I was wearing a shirt with, but I was saying, I was saying like, Oh, it's that's your a drive. And, and I was like, you, to get to it, you typed a colon, you know, and hit enter and you went to your a drive. That's how you started your computer. I said, I remember when they took them out, like you didn't have them anymore. And like, how are you going to start your computer

without an a drive? You can't do that. That's, that's when they took them out. Like, you didn't have them anymore. And like, how are you going to start your computer without an A drive? You can't do that. That's crazy talk. And sure enough, we all survived somehow. And that's why your A drive's never assigned to anything in Windows. Yeah. Because it's reserved for a device you'll never have in your computer. A and B, yeah.

And then it was like, your C drive is always the hard drive. It was always the first hard drive that you had in there and she's like oh that's where those letters came from like yep that's where they came from so there you go a little bit of history was learned in my household whether anybody cares to remember it probably not see tj doesn't care about this stuff he's too young like i loaded retroarch on my apple tv and paired a bluetooth controller and was playing all my old nes games on it and you know i was so happy and i was like seth would like this tj would be like what the hell is this you know yeah luckily or unluckily my first uh foray into computers was windows me and by that time i feel bad i'm surprised you even gotten technology

well that's how i got into it i think fixed everybody's stuff. Fixing it, yeah. Just format and restart is what you had to do, yeah. So, flyby drives weren't too prevalent. I mean, they were still around, obviously, but you guys are like the pioneers.

Because we listen to music like this. classic i'm so jealous you can't even tell those are beeps and bloops like amazing oh you have more than four tracks on that one too no i was in a two-track era i mean that that's can i listen to these on my sonos headphones that's polyphonic right there yeah you you got plenty of voices coming out like i mean get your sound blaster out man come on gotta set your irq before you boot it's in auto exec bat come on oh the command.com is missing open up your configs don't delete those files reserve extra memory ah too good trip down memory lane i like i said i was i was messing around and went down this

midi rabbit hole and then ran across this video on YouTube. So check it out. It is just as funny. It's crazy funny. But yeah, check it out. If you have any questions, feedback, comments, pics of the week or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. You know what you can also do with the the home tech feedback link there that we just mentioned. You can you can say, hey, i want some stickers tj and tj will mail them to you almost instantly almost almost almost instantly as soon as seth does whatever he needs to do which he's been avoiding but we don't talk about that maybe we will talk about it it's pretty sad because i can order stuff from alibaba faster than i can get stickers from tj uh yeah but there's not going to be what? Import duties and stuff like that?

I don't know about those stickers. He's like, I put his 25 cent stickers. I paid $50 in import duties. Yeah, so. All right. Well, we're going to skip project updates tonight. We are going to jump right into this interview with Daniel Moneta over at the Matter Working Group.

Great chat about the new stuff that is in Matter 1.3. And let's just get started on it. All right. And we're going to bring back to the show Daniel Moneta from the Matter Working Group. He is the chair of the Matter Marketing and Product Work Group. Daniel, thanks for coming back and chatting a little bit with us about the new updates over at Matter and what the group there is doing.

And hopefully shed some light on what's new in 1.3 and kind of when we're going to see some of that move into the market. I thought I was just here for TJ's weekly operational update on the sticker distribution system. There is no update. Honestly, that's been like that that's been the most compelling uh storyline so far right like first it was just it's a cliffhanger give us an address we'll send you a sticker in the mail and then there's like this whole like gray market stamp thing and then there's this google map address validation system last time i'm i'm you know waiting there's a behind the scenes document sign thing that was going on

i've got to figure that one out. Yeah, Seth still hasn't finished that. So if you haven't got your sticker yet, that's actually why. It's not me at this point. A DocuSign document? Are you kidding me? Yes. Why are you giving stuff away? You're even giving away the surprise. This is not working out well. In like three weeks

it's going to get handed over to an AI and we're going to somehow have like a toaster factory situation on our hands. We're training our AI right now with all this information we're gathering. Great. This podcast is all sticker talk and printer talk. So if you come for a home automation,

this is probably the only segment we'll have for a little while. Everything else will be printer talk. I have like a $6,000 AWS bill for all the automation I did to make it process stickers and automate them oh man well maybe maybe i mean you guys should just be doing like branded router hats oh man that's a good idea yeah well we definitely talked about that for sure that's that's that's one of

those one of these days we'll we're kind of we're going to do something like that well you joke but you know what i just bought son Sonos hats. Sonos hats? There is a company called Soundskins which make these like, they're more like socks I would say, like these fabric covers for the whole Sonos ecosystem and you know it makes them feel a little bit more like living room friendly

and so I got a few for my ones. Oh we missed out. Lots of different colors. I'm sure they would be happy to do branded merch if you guys uh give them a shout we might have to hit them up for that one yeah no doubt no doubt good call yeah honestly the other day when i was installing some access points for a commercial building i was like man you know ubiquity is kind of the only one that makes like like the vinyl covers for access points because this is like an all

black ceiling and i'm like what am i going to do put white access points on an all black ceiling and basically ubiquity is the only one that does that so somebody else should just come out with like the d brand of uh access points and routers and stuff well we'll have to we'll have to reach out to them and see if we can get some uh them to make our router hats for us well um lately in the news there's been a couple of uh a couple of stories that that crossed our them to make our router hats for us. Well, um, lately in the news, there's been a couple of, uh,

a couple of stories that, that crossed our desk about matter one, three. Um, I think I've seen, well, we've, we've,

we've seen the, the release come out with the, um, like what was going to be in it and, uh, energy management, electric vehicle charging, um, microwave ovens, all sorts of new stuff to kind of entice people and manufacturers to get involved with using Matter is what it sounds like.

Laundry dryers now, not just washers. Big update. That was a big topic last time. That was a big topic. We told you it was coming. Broadly speaking, what are the big updates between Matter 1? I guess we spoke last time at one one what's the the biggest updates between those those two uh releases oh

yeah it's been it's good so last time definitely there was some good um device um category updates um for sure particularly i think that 1.2 was the first uh one that had major appliances and uh robot vacuums and things like that in it. So I think, you know, part of the story from last time was a lot of these devices that you're seeing are sort of foundational, right? Like they're this, you know, we joke, but one of the reasons we did washers was, hey, this is a device type that's kind of a superset of a lot of different appliances. And so, you know, we have to build the functionality that you then get to borrow for all the other ones, and then we'll expand expand on that and so you kind of see that here so

um you know microwave ovens they in of themselves are important but they're also pretty important because they are also usually like the hood the extractor hoods for the stove top and oven below so you kind of need the full stack to have a proper kitchen there things like cooktops those hoods whether whether individual or not laundry dryers so try to really like fill out the the kitchen and laundry use cases there so we think like that's pretty key um we talked about before there's some enhancements to the the matter casting um so beyond just media support um the ability to potentially interact with devices in the home so like get notifications via the matter casting channel on your tv so even if you know it's not you're you're let's say you're not necessarily

running like the smart home app on the tv but you can still get a notification on different surfaces so it's going to be interesting to see how people play with that and you know that can work not just on tvs but on other potential screens and things like that as well. So I think that's pretty cool. There are some foundational work for scene support, which, you know, as you guys know, most ecosystems have their own way of doing scenes and they are somewhat different and not that transparent, especially between like scenes you might set up for on a

device app and then the scenes how they show up in the ecosystem app and so matter is actually now stand standardizing that so like a platform could set the scene and the device actually knows what scene it's in and what the parameters are for that scene so then the platform can just say okay activate scene x and the devices can respond correspondingly so the device holds that as like a preset and instead of like this massive amount of traffic going out to 20 devices you do this you do this you this it's like scene five and it goes to exactly so i like that can make things feel more synchronized and sort of more elegant um it means if you set something in the device you don't have like this sort of these separate species of scenes necessarily in the device vendor app versus the platform app i

mean everybody has to implement this consistently of course um and there's also i mean if you want to get nerdy about it like there's this concept of like valid and invalid scenes so the device can say like hey my the last scene i was set to was the entertainment scene, but I got changed. And so like I'm in an invalid scene right now. And so that helps you understand or like it helps the platform maybe understand like, oh, something got changed. Do I need to change it back?

Or, you know, are there rules around changing it back? Or is there some external thing that got changed? Right. I mean, that comes a lot. That comes up a lot in lighting. When you say you have a group of lights and you want to know, you want to know, like in general, is that group of lights on or is any one of those lights in that group on, or is, uh, are they all at the very same level that the scene is supposed to be on? You know, like you, there's all sorts of little qualifiers you can put on that, uh, and, and kind of like get down into the nitty-gritty and it gets even more complicated with uh like rgb lighting because if you're not on the same exact hue and everything for that light of the color of the light then it's considered out of bounds for that scene and your scene gets deactivated or like you said um uh invalid right invalidated

so yeah that could be that's going to be fun to see how the platform owners start to implement those things and and i it can be a very advanced thing to present so i'll be curious to see how they're able to work through that i mean so i've worked for two platform companies now and like helping especially we talked about this a little last time but users unlike us who don't think of their life and if this then that statements you know think about automations and how they want their home to be set up is is really a challenge and there there are subtle differences between things like automations or routines or scenes and that's not always clear to explain um you know i know in my head i think about like like automations are typically like here's a bunch of actions I want to be taken

at a certain time like I want the vacuum cleaner to run when this happens when I leave the house kind of thing but there's also states that I want my home to be in like I want my living room to be in this state at this time of day or during this kind of activity and if you

just try to do everything as an automation it kind of doesn't work because automations are just like a bunch of actions at one particular time but if like maybe one of those devices aren't didn't like missed it or got changed and then it doesn't know what it's supposed to be in so there's concepts of scenes where the device can change and it's like well i'm supposed to be in scene state x but i know that i'm not and then there can be some logic to say well either come back or oh no the user changed user you're fine so i i think there's a lot of opportunity for people to leverage this to make things feel a little bit smarter and and less disjointed for people um so yeah i mean

that'll take some time there's some work we also will need to do in 1.4 to to build that up and make it more deployable but But as always with these things, like we're giving people the foundation so they can start building with it and it'll show up later on as people do their experiments. There's another similar, and maybe you've mentioned it, but it's a similar enhancement, I guess,

called command batching, which is similar to a scene, but kind of different. But like you can gather a bunch of commands up and save it, I guess, on a device, enhancement i guess called command batching which is similar to a scene but kind of different but like you can gather a bunch of commands up and save it i guess on a device just or save it across devices and then when you send out that command it will replay that what i would call a macro traditionally i would call it a macro or something like that right yeah or a function so i think you're right it's related so like for instance with a scene that makes it easier so i'm not sending out a bunch of commands because there was there were sort of two layers of problem

so one is sending a message to each device individually but sometimes you would even be like okay light turned 20 okay light turned to daylight right and then you'd get like even more chaos as the home catches up and so scenes is one part of that but yeah command batching is another because it's not always necessarily part of a scene. But, you know, I've had experiences where I have, you know, I have an IKEA hub and it's got a bunch of Zigbee lights behind it. And if you use the IKEA app to turn on and off the lights, like they're pretty synchronized because they've done some work to do that.

But if I use another ecosystem to do it, it's clearly just sending like each individual message to every single one of 100 lights and you get the popcorning so this way it's a way to say like hey go do this um bridges are actually a pretty key use case for that because this is often where that happens um because the the sort of source of the commands doesn't own the devices directly and so it's harder for it to do that. So this is going to help a lot with those experiences. We, we, and I, I see it on the CSA's website. We called it the popcorn effect when it went in the early Zigbee lighting days that I was dealing with where you'd press a button and you just kind of watch the lights throughout the

house turn on. And it's not, it's not all that. I mean, it's some people loved it. I think it's cool. It feels very sci-fi my mom is like why is this happening yeah uh but some people i mean it's a lot more elegant if you press the button and they ramp at the same rate up and just kind of hit their target on the money when you programmed them so but i can see it both ways i guess i'm sure someone will create an automation to simulate the popcorn effect oh 100 it's like how electric cars now have to like pump fake engine noise right into the cabin to make or like fake the like gear change jerking to make like it's i'm always fascinated by like

having to put back the analog stuff into it to make you feel like it's different yeah yeah i've been running across some older things i ran across i will probably one of our pick of the weeks shortly if not this week i'm not sure but it's uh like an old adult swim thing about midi music and i'm like oh yeah like how can you make this even harder than it than it was but it was like it reminded me what commuting computing was like yeah back in the day yeah it's, there were hoops we had to jump through. And if you get this new house and you just walk in and you tell it to turn on the light, that's too easy.

Let's get some more hoops to jump through. Yeah. I just had to like disassemble a MIDI file because I wanted a particular piece of it for a notification. I'm like, oh man, I remember when I used to do this all the time. Like, why? How did I have this much time? Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I used to do this all the time like why how did i have this much time yeah yeah it's remember when i used to pay for these things yep yep i remember a lot about midi

sequencing way way more than i should it'll be in demand again someday so i'm sure i'm sure uh it's one of those it's actually one of the standards that's probably will be around for a long time because it's so simple and lightweight but i mean i'm still using it i just uh i just like bought myself a um like a portable keyboard to plug into my quest to do like the piano uh vr app oh and it just uses the midi output like works perfectly it's great yeah exactly it works when i break it yeah i know you're gonna ask for more of the laundry list i was gonna say okay so there's a bunch of like more nerdy stuff that we can get into but i think the big sort of consumer facing thing is the energy and water support and so there's support for i'll be a little bit specific here like um water and energy device types specifically so things like freeze detectors

rain sensors water valves which, which I mean, a valve is like the baseline for a million different types of devices that you can imagine. And so that will help us both like monitoring of water in your home and management and protection. We know that's like a huge use case for so many people, freeze detection, flood detection, etc. And that'll spawn things like irrigation control, which I know you all are a big fan of in this category now. And thank you for naming a bunch of other companies there so I can help round some up. And there are sort of energy type devices. So things like electric vehicle chargers that I mean, that's a big category as well, particularly since it's like

so big a part of your house's energy consumption or reallocation or distribution, depending on when you're charging it. I mean, I've had to run access points down to garages to connect to the, I mean, they're like the range on them is like five feet. And for whatever reason, they just, I mean, so it'd be great if they had a zigbee radio that can punch through a little bit further than some of the wi-fi or bridge into or yeah repeat through other devices well i think having the standard on there is going to be really great because it'll mean like you can you can integrate them with other systems in your house like i mean listen it's great to be able to turn all my lights on and off when i leave the house but you're talking about like cents worth of energy. But if you're manipulating how your, your car is charging, that's, that's

real dollars and that's real grid pressure. And so that's really key. And you're right. Like if they can put like a thread radio in there that can get a lot farther than your wifi is going to, to the garage, you know, that's another great benefit of, of having matter support. Well, it makes it the whole thing more installable. And like, it's already a, it's already a lift to get that charger put into your garage for most people because they don't have it in there, right? They don't have the electrical run.

So they're already being an electrician. And then they find out the wifi doesn't work. So, you know, it's always a problem. Yeah, and honestly, just the energy monitoring in general, I think should be included on everything at this point, just to give you an idea of what you're actually using. You know, some stuff I don't care about the control necessarily i just want to be able to tell how much power it's using for either automations or just to kind of have an idea of

what is efficient and not efficient everything well so i mean that's one of the big other additions in matter which is there is now an energy reporting feature that any smart home device can use so you can report real-time energy usage and consumption historical there's a variety of different measurements and because like not every device has the ability to like directly measure its energy use but a lot of them can estimate it like okay i know i use this much power per hour and i've been on for three hours and so you can even provide estimated energy as part of the reporting and so that's great so exactly to your request every device could potentially be part of an energy management energy reporting system in your home and so i i think that's going to be a big deal going forward sounds good i see there's a bunch of uh bunch of

debugging and developer experience improvements sure i i i'd like to think we had something to do with that they're probably well in progress by the time we spoke last um you know i think it's so funny because one like i think we do appreciate hearing from the industry and and for media and particularly from enthusiasts it it does help like there are things that's like yeah we're we're nerds too and we from enthusiasts, it, it does help. Like there are things that it's like, yeah, we're, we're nerds too and we're thinking about it and we're already talking about it. Um, there are some stuff where it's like, Hey, this keeps coming up. This is something we should work on. So that, that does find its way into it, but it also helps prioritize like,

you know, the squeaky wheel and such. So if I know, if I can point to, Hey, look, this is what we're hearing from the market, from the industry, from journalists, from influencers, it helps to prioritize features and requests. And we've seen that over and over again. So yes, please keep, you know, lighting a fire under our butts about this stuff, whether it's a device support or some of the nerdier stuff. But yeah, we've, we've done a bunch of work on um like timestamp synchronization so that helps to um to make again you know commands and automations fire more synchronously um network commissioning we know the commission like setting up a device is usually one of the big failure points if there are problems and so there's a lot more information now that the devices

can both report and receive as part of commissioning so they can say like hey i only support the 2.4 gigahertz band not five gigahertz and the commissioner can accommodate for that right that's a big challenge um you know what versions of various networking protocols they support so that that's going to help a lot and even like it sounds simple but extended beaconing period like where devices can just send the join beacon for longer and so if a user went and plugged the thing in and it took them more time to sort of get the app and because sometimes they plug it in and then they go install the app and they're like oh i have to register like by the time you're done yeah and now you've got to reset the device 15 minutes yeah yeah so even things like that can have a huge impact on like percentage of people that that have issues so this is all

coming from having devices out in the real world and hearing from people and learning that's great that really is i mean anything that can get the onboarding experience better i mean that's generally the complaints i hear around you know losing the numbers or the numbers are too light on the product to read they're you know like the, like the contrast. Gavin, I took that note. Oh yeah, Gavin had the same problem. Yeah, yeah. You're welcome. I wrote the guidelines for that.

So, you know, please send me examples of challenges. The Aquara, they're very, very, very light on the top of it. If you don't have the sticker, I had to actually pull out my magnifying app on my phone to even get that, you know that that's tough so honestly the compromise we made um and you can see these guidelines i think they're public but it's like okay you have to give the user the standard looking code right like the qr code and the little rounded corner box with the special font and the digits and the matter logo and all that stuff um you should put it on the device but if you cannot for size reasons like

you definitely have to have it in the packaging um but because you know packaging is losable it it should also be on the device somewhere but it is impossible to create a standard that works for every device and every like curve and industrial design so it's kind of like a please make sure this is readable to the user but you can kind of do what you will there so it it's it's tough and some people don't have like different inks to work with on their product but can you at least make like a contrasting standard like if your device is white do not put it in do not put it in like slightly less white, like put it in like a... We give guidance to people, but like, you know, largely they are motivated by their

support costs, right? So, yeah. So, I know sometimes they're hard to read, but I've seen some really, people are trying and I've seen some really difficult spots to try and put that in. But definitely save those stickers you you you kind of get it both ways I can see it from a product design standpoint where you have a product you you spend all this time working on it's nice and now I've got to put this QR code and these numbers on there yeah and I don't want to see them like I I have a little

device that looks nice I don't want to see these big numbers sticking off of it. So like, yeah, I can totally understand why they do it. I don't know. We'll have to see. I'm sure somebody will be inventive with this thing and figure out in the future how to do it a little bit better, a little bit differently. My argument is they have options. You could put the number easily readable on the inside of the cover if you wanted to or something like that.

But when I see them make an effort but again it's a very very light gray on a white background it's almost like they really did not want to do this and that's you know it gets me worked up sometimes it makes you miss like the z wave like click 5 000 times and then hold your breath to like factor reset an object or whatever yeah because i went through it recently with the lifex lights i i lost a little paperwork that came with it and of course the the qr code is at the very bottom of my landscape light and so i have to dig it up from the yard in order to scan the qr code and like untwist the stake and everything and it's like i like i know why you didn't put it on the side or something like that but it just i don't know sometimes it's a pain

point for that for sure yeah and i do see a lot of apps will will if you have a device connected like it'll give you what its code is and so there's lots of creative ways but yeah everybody's trying trying their best i've even seen some third-party apps pop up that collect those for you i know there was a gentleman that was doing for the home kit side of things yeah that's a good idea you just scan and save and say what device it is where it is and it's kind of another database thing to keep up with doesn't make the smart the smart home inventory isn't a very sexy part of uh what you do but yeah uh it at least it makes those issues down the road a little bit easier to overcome it's not matter but i just set up a a new rail link camera and as i was was scanning the little QR code for it,

it actually asked me if I wanted to save it to my phone. And so, I was like, I'll just save it to your photo roll if you want. And I was like, heck yeah, why doesn't everything just do that? There was a time in my life where I had many more pictures of dusty equipment and the back of TVs that I couldn't see behind than I did of my family. That's my case right now. Yeah, yeah. The life of an installer. Well, now, you know, with AI,

you'll be able to go into your Google Photos and search for what was the serial number on that thing? And hopefully we'll find it. Oh, it definitely helped when they came out with what was the minimal thing where you took a picture of it and could just copy the number, the Wi-Fi key off the bottom of the router yeah

yeah yeah great and i i suspect these are all these are all like growing pain things um so matter one three is out and it's got all these new improvements or features that that sound great but like what how do we get these manufacturers to pick up the the mantle and run with one three aquara for example good example just came out with their new hub a bunch of headlines around it matter one one and it's like i know what happened they were working on it a year ago and matter one one was out and they were like we've got to release this product we'll test it with one two and one three later like when you know i i understand right as far as like a product map goes like they got to get the product in a stable version released. How do how know, people, I, I, as someone who spends a lot of their time in marketing, I can tell you, like we monitor what people's requests are and we

monitor social media and we, um, and we see what people are asking for. We also see what people are buying out in the world. So the more popular that gets, um, that, that does actually help. I think the, and, and yeah, Gavin will have some words on the role of of marketing as as you did in the last episode at the moment um but i think it is a marketing challenge right like the if you okay think about think about a company that's just releasing its own products even if there is developer products right like we do this samsung apple google everyone right like they develop some new specifications some new features some new api they under end strict nda go and find a bunch of partners that are that say like hey i

want to work with you on this great and then they all have their boxes and it's all enclosed rooms and it's all like quiet development they're working on it for like a year maybe two years and then we have the big onstage event going check out this thing we invented and check out these three partners that are already ready to go but like they've been like it's been a year since they had sort of the initial spec because it takes time you want to test against each other you want to make sure there's a good user experience it's not just about the spec it's also about like hey what are you going to put in your app what are you going to put in your app and make sure that these things like you know know, have a good user experience together. And so as consumers, we're, we're like, we get cranky when a company makes an announcement about a new product, and it's not even going to be like, I can only pre order it in two months from now, right? Like, that's kind of the window that we get angsty about. Gavin, I know you've been waiting for your 3d printer for like two months, and, you know, keep keep complaining about that. And so like, that's,'s you know that's the the i want it now

window and so but with standards you're doing it all out in the open right so the spec is now available and it's got this list of cool stuff but like people still have to build those things and certify them and test them against each other and make sure that they're they're interoperating and like yes technically i can go out and i can build support for Matter on one side, and I can build a new Matter device on the other side, and they should work together, similar to like ZigBee and Z-Wave and other technologies. that's a lot of people. So you want to make sure that it, it works well. And so you're going to spend the time working with your platform partners and device partners and things and, and really making sure that that that that is a good experience before releasing it. So and then, you know, as time goes by, it gets easier and easier to do once, once you've put out support for, you know, three door locks and vacuum cleaners,

the person who builds the fourth one maybe doesn't need as much ramp time to get that working. So I think that's what you're seeing. It's just that you're having visibility much earlier into the process. And I think if you look at other standards, whether it's like, you know, I know everybody pays attention to the latest and greatest generation of USB specifications, or even like Bluetooth features, right it there's time between announce and and availability and hardware cycles so i actually think the rate that people have been putting out matter products is admirably quickly i think what most people would like to see is the platform supporting more of the core devices and to a depth of features that sort of meet their expectations.

And I think everybody's trying to do that as sort of quickly as possible. It's not going to feel as laggy a couple years from now when, you know, the nine most popular device types are supported. And, you know, it's some longer tail ones that that you're waiting on are there any issues with running a matter let's say a matter hub at one one like i go out and get the aquaroid it's got one one on it and i somehow come across a matter one three device or have something like is there any like i assume there's some backwards compatibility maybe not all the features work is there is there any issues in running two things side by side do we as consumers need to even worry about that i mean so if you got a hub that let's say doesn't support

robot vacuums yet and then you got a matter robot vacuum um right right uh i would hope that the commissioning flow for the hub to connect that vacuum at some point would be like so we don't support this device type yet right right you know go check out the manufacturer's app and you know we'll have an update soon um because otherwise i don't know what it would do with it um companies could potentially get get crafty and like you know try to reuse something because a switch yeah to turn on off device yeah um i don't you're probably not going to see that on a lot of the bigger consumer platforms

because it is, it is a potential safety issues if like you don't really know what you're actuating. Sometimes so, and, and, you know, there's spec compliance issues as well. So whether it will work

and what the definition of work is, is very much up to whoever implemented that. But I mean, generally the core spec is pretty backwards and forwards compatible. But again, I do suspect you will see updates, certainly from Akara and others, and probably a higher cadence of updates going forward.

So on that same topic, what if you had one hub running 1.3 and one running 1.1? Is the device only going to work on the one that has the latest one that supports it? Or is there device only going to work on the one that has the latest one that supports it or is there any confusion will not be seen in all the others i mean so as as far as having multiple so today the way the architecture of matter works is like the ecosystems don't really see each other for the most part okay and so if you have a matter 1.3 hub and there's a

light bulb on it it's just like cool there's a light bulb on me and if that same light bulb is on a matter 1.1 hub it's the same thing like they don't there's no issue with that light bulb being on both of them at the same time obviously if if it's a device type that only one supports and the other doesn't then that's that's a challenge but you know again i think as over the next short amount of time as the platforms build support for like the common device types into a reasonable depth those situations are going to be fewer and farther between right they might be for like more brand new and obscure uh device types right if we do like matter robot arms fine maybe maybe no one will have support for that for a little

while but like no one's going to for that for a little while but like no one's going to be worried about taking home a vacuum cleaner or a light bulb and so i think we'll get there in pretty in pretty short order one of the things i've kind of noticed about a lot of the devices that have come out so far that they're planned is that you know not a lot of them are matter over thread it's pretty much just matter over wi Fi. Do you think we're going to reach a point where thread is more prevalent in the matter ecosystem? Or my thought process is that a lot of people are probably rehashing old devices at this point, or they're developing off older platforms. And so using the Wi Fi is a lot easier than investing in a new, you know, chip and everything else on the device. Do you think we're going to be stuck with a majority

of people still using matter over Wi-Fi in the future? Or do you think that's going to shift at some point? I mean, I definitely think we're going to continue to see both. You're right for devices that already existed, maybe, you know, when they're pushing a software update, it could be easier to do that. But I think there's, you know, Thread was designed to be purpose built for smart home, right? Low power, meshing, longer range, better battery life. And so there are a lot of devices for which that just really makes sense, particularly sensors, door locks, outdoor applications, mission critical applications that like don't depend as much on on your wi-fi and so i i actually there are there are a lot of pretty popular thread based smart home products and they're starting as consumers are learning about thread they're also there's also that differentiation so i think gavin you mentioned you had like the akara um sensors and like how like crazy fast the thread stuff was and so we're starting to see that show up in reviews like that's one of the reasons people love like the Eve products because their responsiveness.

And so I do think you're going to see that more. I think and I think like if you sort of look at what the existing pipeline is, there are there are more devices coming out and a bunch were announced at CES as well. I think the other thing is, you know, Wi-Fi infrastructure in the home is pretty like it's guaranteed that you have Wi-Fi in your home, right? It's not as guaranteed that you have thread in your home today, but that's changing pretty rapidly. I think every product Samsung puts out these days has a hub in it with thread. You're seeing it show up more in a lot of the other ecosystems uh devices um in some of like the network infrastructure devices and and even in matter we're still working on the um the spec for access points and so like a smart home built for matter uh access point router type device

that will bring that and thread infrastructure into the home so i i think as it becomes more ubiquitous as the updates that actually thread announced um coming to the next version of thread make it easier to use make it easier to have one big happy network make it easier for thread devices to have internet access um you won't have those ubiquity concerns and people will will pick thread for the use cases where it makes the most sense sensors low bandwidth devices not cameras that kind of thing yeah like temperature sensors and silly stuff like that where you don't change the batteries all the time and doesn't need a whole lot of power and honestly like i see a lot of interest in like the lighting space as well because you want to be able to send like quick packets like

you look at like the successful lighting companies they've they've typically been 15-4 based right like all phillips is all based on zigbee which is sort of the same radio as thread ikea as well there there are reasons for that like it makes a ton of sense especially for a lot of devices you have around the home that you don't want sort of beholden to wi-fi so i think yeah you'll see definitely a lot more of that yeah not the high bandwidth devices but i've even seen though um like a great use case where Thread is an interesting backup for a device for two reasons. One, so you might have a high bandwidth device, but it's kind of crazy. Like even if you look at, let's say a door lock, right?

And you think about like what the most power consuming thing a door lock does. You would think it's like turning that motor, right? All the time. No, it's waking up the radio all the time and checking in and seeing if i have a message just over time that consumes more so the less power you're doing with that the more battery life you can get and so think about even high bandwidth devices whether it's it's cameras or or even other sort of computing devices that can say like, hey, while I'm kind of in sleep mode, I'll use thread to check in and see if there's any messages for me.

And if there's something interesting to do, I'll wake up my Wi-Fi radio. So there's that use case. I've also, you know, seen where, you know, let's say you've got an appliance. And, you know, sometimes it's hard to get consumers to connect that appliance in the first place, but a lot of your functionality depends on it, or there's a sensor down in your basement that's pretty mission critical, and you connect it over Wi Fi. But as we talked about before, like maybe your credentials change, maybe you switch the Wi Fi router, and you forgot about that other device, you're almost guaranteed to reconnect whatever devices your thread border router because it's probably your access point, or it's probably your access point or it's probably your tv or it's probably you know some smart home hub with

a screen on it that you love that sits in your kitchen and when you do that your thread devices will come back online and they can either say hey you need to reconnect my wi-fi or might even pass the wi-fi credentials via thread and come back up without you noticing so there's a lot of use cases even for having both in a device yeah yeah that's interesting that'd be great to have just a little low latency messaging to wake up and and go do your thing yeah for sure i mean think about my phone like think about all the things that happen on my phone while it's asleep like 90 of them are just like notifications and it's constantly waking up the the cell or the wiFi radio. My phone has a Thread radio in it right now. Yeah, maybe that's what it's for.

Comment on that one. But you can imagine there are use cases. Yeah, definitely. Well, yeah, and we've seen that there's another, I mean, I guess competing network, so to speak, the sidewalk network that Amazon has that has a very similar setup to that. I don't know if Ring has actually used the like i think they have said that they use the messaging side of that like the little low latency i forget what they're using it may be like between bluetooth or some type of thread or zigbee radio i'm not sure

but um they use that to kind of wake up the devices when the doorbell is pressed or something like that rather than send the wake up the camera radio the doorbell is pressed or something like that, rather than send the, wake up the camera radio, record the video, send it out and that kind of thing. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's not an atypical use case, right? Try and use a low power radio to wake up the big one. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you guys have a lot going on. What's next? I mean, to the, to the degree that it's, that it's public, you know, I think we continue to

work on the, you know, core spec improvements. We're at a really interesting point with it now where there are now devices in field from a number of different vendors, big and small, you know, large and innovative companies. There's, you know, now devices in millions of of homes and everybody has data on their performance and where people are having difficulties and so we're kind of at the place now where it's really interesting because we can share experience data with each other and say hey you know we're seeing users have trouble setting up devices are you seeing the same thing and we can corroborate that information and then look at

the spec and address it and then like that's you know how the extending the beginning period for instance uh came out we're saying hey you know there's a lot of people they're trying to commission devices and like the device just isn't broadcasting anymore and then we have to like walk them through unplug it and plug it back in again etc so that's an easy fix so i think we're at a point where like we're gonna we can through both process as well as spec and sdk implement some like low-hanging fruit improvements that are going to help a lot of users and a lot of device makers build build better higher quality more reliable devices but also focusing on those other fundamentals like i talked about like making sure more homes have smart home infrastructure that is reliable, that is ready for matter and thread devices, that the device vendors building devices can rely on as well.

So I think we're going to see more of that and making sure that those pieces come together well um there's a bunch of new device types that we're we're working on so things that you can you can imagine coming out of the ones we've announced like hey once you have valve support what are the other types of devices um working on things that are like um closure actuators so think about like garage doors and awnings and and things like that so we're at a cool place where we've we've built a lot of those fundamental building blocks and now we add to it, but also working on making sure there's good broader support for the device types and the features and defining MVP experiences on device types and trying to like raise that bar across the industry. Very cool. Gavin, do you have something? Oh, yeah.

I was saving this towards the end, but you know, I had a question. Sure. What's, like, the biggest matter setup you've run by so far in terms of number of devices? Like, a particular person's home? Yeah. Because I was going to cheat and say, like, the Interop Lab from the CSA that has quite a number of devices. I think, I mean, you know, I've seen ones with dozens of devices. I'm sure there are people who have more.

How good is scaling with Matter? Because where I'm trying to like coming from, right? When you're looking at Zigbee and Z-Wave, as you scale out more, you get into situations where you set a scene and, you know, things start to slow down. Too many commands going over the network at the same time, right? It starts to chug along and you start to see more issues as it gets bigger sure are we gonna what's the bandwidth like with matter will you see that type of thing where you could send too many commands and it floods the network or energy monitoring devices can flood the network and i'm specifically talking i guess the thread network because wi-fi has much more bandwidth at that point right yeah i mean there's bandwidth but then there's just like number of messages coming across as well

um and and storage for that data as well you know i think the first place where you're like more likely to have a bottleneck is you know whatever hub you have like does it have resources to handle the number of devices the number of devices, the number of concurrent commands, the automations, et cetera. And those range. So now one of the nice things is the power of your hub probably scales with the size of your smart home, right? You are unlikely to run a smart home with a thousand devices hanging off of it off like the hub that came with your tv or a 15 year old google home hub or something right like you're gonna probably have a more powerful newer device so so just like the the social economics um make sense and that

the more power users are going to have the more powerful devices um you know in terms of like network upper limits probably people have not hit that outside of a laboratory yet because um you know just the number of devices that they're they're putting into homes that are all that would be all matter etc but it's one of the reasons why we keep trying to make improvements on things like intermittently connected devices so making sure like every time a battery operated device like we're not constantly pinging devices to make sure they're awake um being able to like batch commands being able to do scenes so we're not sending like five different commands per device in a in a scene and making sure that like as we move into the future it continues to scale i don't remember what the upper limit on like nodes in a thread network are but i don't think

you have to worry about probably not but yeah with the z thread network are, but I don't think you have to worry about it. Probably not. But yeah, with the Z-Wave and Zigbee, I don't even get close to that. And you'll see like you'll hit some limits when things start happening in your home. Right. Yeah. And I was just curious if we'll see that. I had another question too. I wanted to save this one for when we're off the air because I think I'd get a much better answer.

But let me ask it anyway just ask it twice um any juicy stories what issues you've had with vendors um i guess working with vendors um trying to twist the standard or you know do their own type of thing or just create your life difficult for yourself gavin wants the drama he wants the drama i don't want to wait for the movie i want to we all know who he's talking about but we won't say I definitely can't name and shame on that one um I you know I think one of the things that is pretty unique about matter is and we talked about this last time like there's the spec and there's the SDK so I think one of the challenges that

you you've seen in I mean at any standard but certainly smart home in the past is like you had the spec and then you'd go and you'd write all your code in a way that conforms to the spec. And one, like often in that process, you're like, hmm, there's two ways to interpret the specification that the authors maybe didn't realize when they wrote it. And then if two people implement it differently, then it doesn't necessarily work together well. Or people just sort of made mistakes or different assumptions or put different limits. So one of the things we did with matter is we have the spec, we also have this like open source code base that you can literally like drag and drop into your device and use and it should be certifiable.

And we we make sure that it is the sort of unified interpretation of the spec and in doing the SDK often we encounter that like oh hey we need to tweak the spec or we need to tweak the SDK to make sure that like these line up and are not ambiguously interpretable and so that's a really good exercise so I think for the most part people who are using that do pretty well we do see people modifying it because it's it's open source and you can do that and you might have your own applications and your own particular circumstances I think when people start doing that too much is where you start getting into challenges i don't think that there are any necessarily bad actors around that i've seen but i have seen companies where like they're really trying to make sure

their devices sort of work in their existing ecosystem as well as in this new world of matter and are trying to make trade-offs and like that can sometimes butt up against other things. But, you know, one of the things we're doing is working on not just spec, but also internal process for, hey, when we see these things in the field,

in these issues, how can we quickly like share with each other, make sure this isn't an isolated thing, work with that device manufacturer to correct it because everybody's motivated to make sure this stuff works. So thing work with that device manufacturer to correct it because everybody's motivated to make sure this stuff works so um yeah thankfully that's been that's been going well it's a lot different than some of the early like smart energy days where like some utility would just be like i know this field is only supposed to have 120 characters but i like

240 so deal with it because i'm buying millions of dollars of product for you but then it's really difficult to yeah accommodate for everybody i've seen that in in the zigbee space where it's like you have all these clusters you're supposed to send this command over but you created your own custom one yeah that's not the right bit length that causes crashing on other devices yeah there may be a few cda platforms that got super creative with the zigbee spec early on, right? Yes. So yeah, we're trying and as always, like it's the tech solution and then like the process and the social solution and making sure that we can come together.

And that's the beauty of open standards, right? Like if you're doing something proprietary, you're on your own to figure out why that thing you just did didn't work. Here you have a community. I think you get a great example there about the energy company that comes along and says, we're putting in a million orders of these a month and you've got to do it our way or the highway because we're not releasing an update to our energy thing or whatever.

I mean, that's kind of like, that bully can't really come into play here because there's an entire community that's got to go, well, that's really not how it's going to work this time. And you're just going to be left out in the dark right or they are not certifiable yeah they don't get the logo and like yeah it's different sometimes in in industrial space where you can kind of get away with that but it's harder in the consumer space where you have to be able to say hey we're we're matter compatible nice i'm looking through the uh the pull requests that are open right now there's 161 open so there's there's lots going on we're always working yeah i don't understand half of them that are in here probably neither do i and sometimes just to be just to be fun i throw i walk in there with my marketing hat on and be like guys this is a terrible name for

this and then see what happens and just thinking buzzwords are hot things in the space right now um you don't have to say what you're working on because i can't think of ideas but i'm pretty sure you you guys have looked at it but um voice assistants or ai are they being looked at in any way you know could give us any juice so like from the matter standpoint that that is like a couple steps removed from like the interoperability spec right that's a really good example of a place where you want to have good standards for interop so that you're spending your time, not on getting the effing light to turn off, but,

you know, figuring out how to get the AI to turn the light on and off and innovating in that space. So those specifically haven't intersected. You know, I know as an industry, we're all looking at ways to see, can AI be leveraged to help make the smart home easier for and common boarding and other ways to like make it more accessible to the rest of the home. And maybe AI is a way to do that for all of us that don't know

how to program automations or, you know, can AI be like the power user helping the mainstream user out like like is all of our jobs right now. And so I think there's a lot of explorations there. I think where the two pieces will intersect is like, if there's contextual information that an AI assistant would need to know that needs to be like the devices need to know a reporter needs to be in the spec, then I think, you know, that's where that will come back to that kind of work.

Yeah. I think the power from AI in the home is really going to come from the sensor feedback, like in having the sensor labeled correctly, just to what does where it is what you know the output on it's correct or not like getting that information back into a model of some type that could better make well make better decisions for the house or interactions with the end user um is i think that's really going to be key and the problem is like i look around my house i've got all these lights on i guess those in in turn they're kind of a sensor but like they're just lights they turn on and off um but i really don't have that

many sensors like i have two or three motion type sensors that are doing something around but you know for temperature there's ecobee some flare stuff like it's all kind of like not bound together and not really going and being yeah consumed by any one thing to figure out how my house actually operates and until there's a standard like matter that's that's gathering all that information up it's kind of hard for any model or any any type of ai type device or service to kind of look into that and see what's going on. Yeah, it's a really good point. Like standardizing the information

really helps drive innovation in that space because you can directly access it. And so like a non-AI example. It's a huge lift to gather all that different product together. Like I could do it through something. I could do it through Control 4, Home Assistant, whatever. But then like I've spent all my time doing that.

Right. Well, and so that's where I think like the open standards is going to be so exciting in the home. So we talked about energy management before, right? Like, so you've got all these devices, they can do energy reporting. That's great. And you've picked, you know, your smart home tech platform of choice someone could come tomorrow and say like hey we have this really cool approach to energy management or security or health care or whatever um and we want to offer it to you like historically the only way to do that is like they got to come in and install a gateway

and a bunch of other devices and you have to pick between you know you really like the smart home experience from you know company a but you want the service from company b because maybe it's like life or energy or money mission critical with an open smart home with ip based with things like matter like you could layer that on top right i could have a smart things house but someone could come in and have a really cool smart home service that's not you know maybe samsung doesn't offer and they can connect to devices with my permission and they don't have devices with my permission. And they don't have to build all that stuff from the ground up.

And to your point, because the data models are the same, like they know how to do this. They don't have to like build it differently for every single one. And AI could be a great, a great part of that as well. Yep. Well, I mean, it's buzzword. It's the buzzword of the week, you know? Yeah. I mean, so the question, I think the real question is like how the sensor data is interesting. But honestly, I think like the big thing that's missing right now from, you know, voice assistance and voice control is like, it's not that it doesn't know what my home it's

doing is that it doesn't know what I want. I don't know what I want most of the time. Like we have all set up that automation that we thought was brilliant and that pissed us off within like 10 seconds of running it or like 10% of the time we don't want it to fire and it's really annoying when it does and so can it can an ai and am and or am i willing to hand over whatever information or you know privacy or monitoring required um for it to learn what i want to happen and when and the context around my home and who's in it. And, you know, hopefully there's some intersection between like local AI processing

and present sensors that are at cameras watching everything I do that can, that's a happy middle ground to inform that. Well, if this week tells us anything, it's never going to have Scarlett Johansson's voice. So get that guys it's not gonna happen uh yeah what a mess that is that that was funny to watch because i watched the demos and i'm like boy this really sounds like the voice from her and then he tweeted about it and i was like oh this is yeah that's problematic you probably shouldn't have done that yeah i i yeah i don't i don't know i i i think there will always be a market for the Sultry assistant or whatever, like voice assistant. And I know by no means does she have the monopoly on that branding, but I don't know. They could have gone a different direction with it. But yeah, what turned out to really be a nice demo this kind of gets clouded up by all of this other drama off to the side i feel like they're in the like you know all news is good news

a core exposure kind of camp right now could be true yeah i think where you get in trouble is where you like offer to do a deal with someone and they say no and then you just like kind of do it anyways um find somebody else yeah but that's that's you know this is the conversation i'm having with my my friends and family this week which is like i've been using some of these like voice ai simulators uh and like they're very frighteningly good like i was able to train a voice that sounds i find indistinguishable for me on like a handful of whats voice notes. So like not even intent, like not even audio that I did to intentionally train it. Wow. And so like my family, when I, we all got together recently,

I'm like, okay, we're going to have a secret word that if some, if something that sounds exactly like me calls and asks you for like $10,000 in Amazon gift cards, uh, you know, you got to ask for the secret word and i feel like everybody needs to have that now what'd you use the secret word is amazon gift card make it very meta yeah so on the other hand i never have to give the slide deck ever again i can just like dump my slide notes into into the the voice and uh and see how it goes so yeah it's it's a weird it's a weird world. But on the other hand, like, you know,

having an AI assistant that sounds like me or a member of my family, if that's funny to you, like Bixby can do that on the Galaxy phones. You can like train it to kind of speak with your voice.

And so like I had my girlfriend do that and it's kind of funny, like she hears me do other. So it depends whether you find that like on the creepy end of the continuum or the cute end of the continuum. I mean, it's definitely interesting get it we're all we're all kind of moving i guess it's kind of going to bring you my one of my last questions here is what are you finding very interesting these days like is it is it these voice models or you know is it is it uh ai in

general like what what what smart home adjacent or related or even directly, directly implemented technology? Are you looking at these days and finding interesting? I mean, yeah, we talked about the AI stuff that's going to intersect everything, right? You know, I'm really interested in, you know, again, that that move of the smart home from sort of the walled garden ecosystems to this Venn diagram where, you know, you can pick, it's more like the internet where you can pick the providers of the different pieces of value that you want and they can, you know, be part of your home rather than sort of having to commit to one. It's like, hey, I really like this feature of this platform, but they sort of do this other thing not as well, but I'm stuck stuck and so i think that's really starting to

open up the home in ways that that maybe people are under appreciating i think especially as you have energy data and water data and other kinds of data you'll start to see more and more surfaces layered on on top of that and i think you'll start to see more um more openness in the smart home more people sort of turning a smart home from like a remote control from your home into, into a platform that people can build on. I mean, that's something, you know, to plug up our own, like smart things has been doing for a long time, allowing third party developers to create like cool smart home applications on top of the platform. And I think you're starting to see that more and more personally, like what I'm really interested

in people who are um again i'll come back to this like just trying to make the smart homework for everybody else in the home like the household acceptance factor um how can how can we create a great opportunity a great experience for the power users if there is one in the home um that also works for everybody else um up to and including if there isn't that person in the home and i think people are doing some really innovative stuff in that space um all the stuff we announced at ces like map view which has like a sims like view of your house right on your tv screen and like even has little avatars that can help you figure out what's what's going wrong or like what you need to check

on people responded to that really well because for the first time it's like you know i know gavin likes a good home home assistant dashboard but not everybody uh wants to view their home uh that way and so i think there's going to be a lot of innovation that just like makes a smart homework for every type of user i am very excited about that as well i mean it, the way you just, well, I mean, the nerdy way you described it was the Venn diagram of everything kind of intersecting somehow. And I mean, you kind of like mentioned some CDA players with their ZigBee, like Control 4 has been a ZigBee HA, I think is what they ran for decades and I saw a post on Facebook of one of the groups I'm in from one of their product people talking about how they were, they served us well, but we're moving away. And I asked him if they were moving to ZigBee three, you know, and he's like, yep, we're trying to, and you know, that'll, that'll be exciting because then I could take my control

for ZigBee three Oh, um, devices and, and implement them into a home assistant project or something like that. I could go all around, but it becomes more of like you said, picking and putting the devices that I find the most trust in. I have used the Control 4 Lighting product for years. It works great. And if it was paired with, you know, I haven't used other brands, admittedly, like a couple Lutron, I guess, but it's not a Zigbee brand. But like if I were to find a product that worked as well, I might introduce that into the system. And, you know, it's one of those things like as a professional integrator, you have to find something that you make money on, like first and foremost, that you can feed your kids with.

Right. And so like, but a lot of that comes from trusting the product and the brand and everything to continue to work. Yes. After you walk away from the job site, like, because we don't live in those. Oh, try not to. We don't live in those houses. But sometimes we are there more than we want to be. And I think you're seeing pressure from the sort of device vendor side of stuff, too, because it feels like there's this um tension between like

standardization and and um differentiation right and um you know i think a lot of people are used to the older smart home world where yes you have these technologies where like you buy this device it connects to someone else's hub and then that's it like it's sort of behind that hub forever and so it's that other company that has the hub that is responsible for the user interface to the user. And so like you can't really add a cool new feature if that user interface doesn't support it. So you do sort of see a lot of like, oh, the standard devices have become commodity devices

because everyone's trying to be sort of the lowest cost supplier to the ISP or the security provider, the home automation provider that sort of makes lowest cost supplier to the ISP or the security provider, the home automation provider that sort of makes this hub. And some companies have been able to compete on like the device itself, particularly think about like door locks where they can like build something that's beautiful and has good industrial design, it's reliable, but on the connectivity side, it's a little bit harder. You know, I think in this new era of the smart home, you kind of get best of both worlds. You have the standard and sure you can connect to some other systems hub for sort of the sort of standard control command and control, but you're on an IP network.

So you can have your own app and you can have cool, cool features that, that, you know, are available in your app. And maybe you can work with your partner to make that available in the ecosystem, but you, you're not held back from innovating and differentiating in that same way. And so I think you're seeing a lot of device makers that, you know, there's certainly companies out there that, you know, they just want to sell 10 billion commodity light bulbs, and that's fine, great standards for you. But you can go way above and beyond that with like this new open model of the smart home. And so yes, there will be device vendor apps for the foreseeable future but

honestly that's a good thing because i've i've heard you guys complain as many times about like not having a cool feature as about having like another app for that cool feature and so uh you know this you can have it both ways depending on which device you buy i see that a couple times recently actually i'm not going to name names because I don't want to get in trouble, but I bought a nice matter compatible contact or motion sensor, right? And they're like, yeah, it does motion sensing, but it also does all this other stuff. But if you want to get access to that, you need to actually buy our M3 hub, you know, and you have access to it right now not naming anybody

not naming any names just model numbers and schemes yeah very specific model that's not a trend i'm liking because my whole point of buying that matter device was not to have to buy an m3 hub right um but now i'm seeing that and i'm wondering oh who else is going to do something like this where you know it's not just an app I put on my phone, but I have to actually buy more physical hardware. I hope that's not a trend. I mean, that's certainly that's an implementation choice. I think, yeah, if the MatterSpec supports, you know, three, these three features, but you have a couple other cool features that are specific to like your device or ecosystem, then you can offer that through, let's say your app, that they're offering it through their hub is, you know, an architecture choice, or maybe it requires the hub for some reason. And like,

I can't speak to that one specifically. But, you know, it may need that to be able to do that, the function that you need, especially if their device is maybe like a low power sleepy battery device on the other side. So I've seen that but yeah i mean that that might be the case i think for both consumers and device makers there are choices to have like if you just want to go out and you want to buy like a bog standard sensor that does x y and z and you know that the platform you have does x y and z that's fine but if you want to buy one that has those cool extra features then yeah you might want to you know there might be a an app that allows you to have access to those features. And the nice thing is if like, if those features turn out to be popular, they can build that into the standard and, and platforms can support it as

well. So you'll, it's the story of tech, right? Like what is differentiated today becomes table stakes tomorrow. And so you'll, you'll see that cycle. You always make it sound better than I can make it sound. I guess that's why you're in the marketing. Yes. Yeah, we try. I know you have some words for marketers. Listen, so on that, as a marketer, there's a couple problems you can have as a marketing person. You can have, hey, we've got this thing and people say either, that sounds stupid. I don't want that thing. That's a bad problem to have. If people are like, that sounds great, but like, you're not delivering fully on that thing yet, or we want more of the thing, where's the thing? That's a good problem to have, right? And so like, thankfully,

you guys are really noisy about the second thing. So I definitely would rather be in this camp. And I think it's, you know, for us, it's a matter of making sure that we're learning from the field, we're fixing and updating and improving the experience for people where there's experience challenges, and just building that momentum so that there are more and more devices. But I do think there's always going to be some time differential there, and we're working on things to help shorten that up and incentivize it and raise that bar. But I think we're just in that space where the people that are most excited about it are just excited and we're doing our best to drive it. Well, all good stuff this time. Daniel, we really want to say thank you for coming by and chatting with us today.

I mean, we're going to hit that 140 mark again. I don't know, it's going to happen. And we haven't even talked about cross-border duties yet. That was my other hot button issue I wanted to... Yeah. We had all sorts of stuff lined up. Yeah, yeah. Your projects, we'll have to get to your projects next time, I guess.

Sure. Project updates, yeah. Yeah, right now it's a new air fryer and a giant Lego set that's blurred out in the background behind me. That works. That works. That works. That'll keep you busy. It's when I automate the smoke plume underneath the rocket.

That's when the smart home stuff comes in. Well, cool, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, taking your time to share with us the new things that are going on with Matter. We're definitely going to have to have you on in the future. But in between now and then, if people want to reach out and chat with you and ask questions, what's a good way to get in touch with you? You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm dmonetta there. I'm also around by my name on Instagram. I don't know if that's a good idea to advertise. Or you can email me at dmonetta or daniel at wowsignalcorp.com. Well, Daniel, thanks so much. And we'll talk to you next time.

All right. Well, Daniel, thanks so much. And we'll talk to you next time. All right. Thanks guys. All right. Well, that wraps up the interview here and, uh, I don't know. Good talk.

Um, I, I, I don't know. He was, he was assigned, I guess, to talk Gavin off the ledge.

Gavin's been worried about what was going on with matter for a while. And I think, I don't know, Gavin, you seem satisfied. Are you satisfied, Gavin? I have to admit,

Daniel is good at his job every time you know i'm not willing to spend any more money on matter he convinces me otherwise somehow i think he hypnotizes me or something like that and then i'm ready to buy another better device you know i'm up to five matter devices in my home setup right now so probably by next week i'll be at six or seven good job yeah he needs a he needs a pay raise is what we're trying to tell matter yes yeah there's there's a lot going on with matter it just it it sounds like they are just about around the corner though um having like all the what you call the core devices i guess kind of mapped out and then like you were saying they can kind of build on top of those start putting those pieces of the puzzle together uh Start adding on top of those things to make more complex devices.

And that's how programming goes. You got to start at the bottom and work your way up, especially this open source stuff. They can't just, you know, start with some library that's commercially available that probably has half or not all the stuff in it. They can't start from that. They've got to write it from scratch. They've got to test it. They've got to debug what's going on. They have to make it work. They're doing all this extra stuff. In

fact, they're putting like a example code out there that like you said, was tested and working and certified example code that you can just drag and drop over into your project if you're a manufacturer. So that, that all takes time, takes effort. I'm glad to see, glad to see them working on it. So I can't wait to see what comes out in 1.4. Sounds like there's going to be some interesting stuff in that too. And Matter's come, I have to admit, it's come a long way since even Matter 1.1. And I don't know if that's Matter that's come a long way or it was my home assistant setup that's come a long way.

But I remember when I first jumped on matter, my devices were dropping off constantly. And since then there've been changes, updates, you know, fixes, and it's actually been really reliable running really fast. And, you know, like that's why I said, I went from one matter device that kept dropping off and now I have five that they don't drop off anymore and they just work. So I have no complaints about anymore. I have a few little complaints here and there anymore and they just work. So I have no complaints about it anymore. I have a few little complaints here and there, but he took note. I saw him writing some stuff down. I think you're more worried about the fragmentation, how that's going to work.

I'm with you. You don't want to invest a lot of time and effort into something like this if it's just going to get broken off and somebody's going to run their own way with it or whatever so i mean we've all been burned on that in the past so i can totally understand why you'd be hesitant in that but yeah i i think it's they've got a good path forward i like how they're doing it all out in the open you know one one four he said what was later fall so yeah november december sometime in that time frame uh we should be able to take a look at what's going on at one four and talk to them again. Maybe they'll add support for headphones. All right. Well,

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