Google started rolling out support for Matter to its smart home devices last year, but Amazon wasn’t ready to flip the switch on its own hardware just yet. That’s now changing, as Matter support is rolling out to some of Amazon’s smart home devices.
Amazon has announced a new update for Matter-compatible Alexa devices, as the company confirms that it has surpassed 100 million Matter-enabled Echo smart speakers. Previously, to set up Matter devices with Amazon Alexa, you needed to do so through an Android phone, and it could only be over Wi-Fi. Now, though, Amazon is rolling out a big update that will let you not only set up devices with an iOS phone as well but also devices that work with Thread.
As for Amazon’s own products, the company said in a blog post, “We enabled second generation Echo, Echo Plus, and Echo Dot devices to be updated as Matter controllers, plus Echo (4th Gen) as a Thread border router. That means, Echo (4th Gen) customers can now expand their smart homes with Matter-enabled Thread devices in addition to WiFi, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Mesh, and Matter-enabled WiFi devices.”
This means that you’ll be able to use a wider range of devices within the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, such as Eve smart plugs, that use Thread instead of Wi-Fi for connectivity. It also means that for these devices, you wouldn’t depend on having an Internet connection for them to communicate with each other.
There are still improvements to be made. For one, Alexa still doesn’t support bridges in Thread regardless of today’s update, which can limit some of the devices you can enroll in the platform. However, full support for this is in the pipeline.
Source: Amazon
Via: The Verge
