The Vergecast Matter Holiday Spec-Tacular
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all built into a single platform you can use right now. And that's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit servicenow.com slash AI for people to learn more. Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Neelai's new Wi-Fi equipped oven, which I think has just been delivered very recently. Neelai Patel is here. Hi, Neelai. We have a new oven and new dishwasher. These are our big Black Friday purchases. They use different apps.

This is going to be a real theme. This is unironically what we are here to talk about. Jen Tu is also here. Hi, Jen. Hi. Happy to be here. Happy holidays. This is our holiday spectacular. And this year, if you didn't already know from the title of this episode, our topic is matter and the smart home that both is and is not. And we'll solve all of our problems and we'll make us all miserable until the end of time.

And so we're going to we're going to dig deep into this. We have some time with Paulus, who runs Home Assistant. Later on, we're going to play some games. But I think we should we should just level set here first. And Jen, I think you are the correct person to do this for us before Neil gets too deep into his feelings about the smartness of his appliances that have just arrived. Let's just talk about where both what matter is and where it is kind of in the world right now. So like truly, let's start from nothing.

If you were living under a rock until six minutes before you press play on this podcast, what is Matter? Okay. So Matter is a open source standard for the smart home.

It is created by over 200 different companies, spearheaded by some of the big players, Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon. It is designed as a communication and interoperability protocol for your smart home. Basically, it's designed to make any smart connected device that you buy, microwave,

dishwasher, fridge, smart light, smart lock, be able to talk to each other in your home, communicate locally in your home, as well as communicate to a smart home platform like Apple Home, Home Assistant, Google Home, so that you can control those devices locally. You can use your smart home on any platform that you like. This is one of the key sort of features of Matter is that because all of the big platforms are on board,

that any Matter device should work with any smart home platform. And, you know, the manufacturers don't have to develop individual partnerships with different companies in order to work with Apple HomeKit or to work with Amazon Alexa. If you work with Matter, you should be compatible with all the platforms. So it's designed to make the smart home simpler, more reliable, more secure, and much more interoperable. So in theory, Nilay,

buys on Black Friday some fancy new stove and dishwasher. Yes. Sticks it in, plugs it in. Magic. Smart home. In theory. How's that going? Neil, how'd it go? How we doing? It's not going great. I want to be clear that our microwave and refrigerator also have different apps.

This is just the nature of the beast. But it's also we have a bunch of smart plugs in our house and a Lutron light switch system. And that isn't part of matter. And then we have Philips Hue lights in one room. And that isn't part of matter. I suspect no matter what we do, we will be drawn to talking about smart vacuum cleaners like the death of the universe. Just that is the black hole of all smart home gadgets it feels like.

None of those are on me. But I'm aware that the standard is coming to support it. Yes. There's just a lot of that. Yes, it's coming. There is a lot of that. That is true. But it's a standard, right? And it's only been around two years to give it some wiggle room. That's not a long time in the scope of developing a standard. Although it was launched and announced 2019, right?

It took them a couple of years to get all the ducks in a row. Which I think, to be fair, given what happened after 2019, I think I'm very forgiving of things happening slowly. That was your time to focus. We all got into like sourdough baking. There's no time for connectivity standards. Well, but we also all kind of got into our homes a bit more.

into the smart home. It was kind of, in a way, a good moment for the smart home. But what they've been doing since the launch is adding more device types, more support for features that are part of the devices that you use.

But ultimately, the idea of matter is just this connectivity layer, like the plumbing for your smart home, the Wi-Fi for your smart home. You know, it's the connectivity that will enable you to do all of the fancy things that you might want to do with your smart home.

Like have your smart lights turn on in the morning when you say good morning or when you walk past a motion sensor or have your smart locks lock and your lights turn off and your thermostat adjust at night when you say good night. And there's also more sort of ambitious ideas about like holidays.

whole home energy management. And this is where smart appliances come into play. Because the butt of the Internet of Things jokes is other fridges and the dishwashers and the microwaves. Like, why do I need to connect these devices to Wi-Fi? What benefit do I get other than an alert on my phone telling me that my dishwasher is done? Which actually is quite useful. Mine plays like a six-minute long song every time it's finished. So I feel like I know pretty successfully when it's done. But once we can connect...

all the energy devices on our homes, including things like home battery storage systems, solar panels, HVAC systems, all of that to a home energy management platform, you can see some potential there for saving energy, saving money. There are some use cases sort of down the line that are more than just the fun, the shades are going to go up when you say good morning at

Which are fun, and we like those things. But there's a big whole sort of long goal of what the smart home use case could be. It is a long-term goal, and I think we are...

We have not got very far in the first two years. Fair. Yeah, to that end, you have prepared for us a report card of what is real and what is not, which is I feel like every time you come on the show and we talk about this, it's like, what if this is actually real in real life for real people?

And that is like the eternal question of matter and one I suspect we're going to spend a bunch of time here talking about. Do you want to take us through the report card you've given for matter so far? Okay, yeah. And, you know, it's the end of the year. So, and I have two teenagers in high school. So report cards are heavily on my,

This is a useful place to start. How tough a parent are you when it comes? Like, are you the like, why is this A minus not an A plus kind of parent? Or are you like, oh, tight. A D is technically passing. Great job. I'm going with that one. Okay.

See, my dad in particular was, if you get straight A's, I won't care about how much additional trouble you get into. Which is an incredible incentive. He did end up talking to every principal I ever had. Yeah. And I don't know that the smart home is there. Like, it hasn't earned that grace. You definitely strike me as somebody who got a lot of parent-teacher conferences that were like, he has the highest grade in the class, but he's a gigantic pain.

can you fix that? And your parents were just like, you said he's getting the highest grade in the class, so we're cool. That was more or less my father's approach. I just want to be very clear. That is not where matter is at all. You're not like, this is so good, I will put up with the fact that the kitchen's on fire. It's much more like, are you here? Yeah, matter's getting the parent teaching conference where it's like-

Attendance. Okay. Attendance. Oh, oh, that's a tough one. I mean, I think actually 2024, we kind of felt like Matto was maybe playing a little bit hooky. Yeah.

Because that wasn't, I mean, we had so much momentum in the first year. There was a lot of new devices, a lot of new device types, a lot of companies jumping on board. This last year was a little quieter. And also we had two spec releases, which they promised, and they were very much kind of fixing problems. Right.

The biggest thing that I've been sort of disappointed with this year has been that we're not, we have not seen a ton of new products, especially in these new categories, which are really kind of new to the smart home, like the home energy management, the appliances.

There just haven't been a lot of new devices that have come to market. So it's like the system and the infrastructure is there. So, you know, school's there, but, you know, maybe they didn't actually show up to all the classes. Which is pretty important, I would say. Yes, it is. And the school existing is good. Yeah. It's not the whole job. Yeah. And that's my...

sort of biggest downgrade here isn't really Matter's problem, but it's the platform's problem. So we have these device types that have all been added in the last year or two, like robot vacuums,

But the platform support has been very slow and spotty. By platform support, you mean Apple and Google, right? I mean the ecosystems, the smart home ecosystems. And that's interoperability, working with every ecosystem is kind of the most consumer-facing element of Matter. Like, oh, great, I can buy this smart lock or this smart plug, and I don't need to worry whether it works with Apple or works with Alexa. If it works with Matter, it will work with whichever smart home platform I want to use.

And I may start out with Apple Home and then decide, actually, I want to upgrade and work with Home Assistant, as we will talk about later. But also, you know, and I can do that without having to go buy new products because everything works with everything. However, you know, that falls apart when...

We say, oh, this smart fridge is Matter compatible. There is one out there that you can buy. I'm guessing it's not the one you bought, Nilay, sadly. But I go to my Apple Home app and I scan my Matter code thinking, well, it's Matter and it works with Apple. And no, because Apple doesn't support fridges yet. You know, there's a lot of this. So we're still waiting for the ecosystems to catch up with support for what

The CSA, Connectivity Standards Alliance, the group behind MATA, is rolling out with each new spec release when we're getting two a year. So the ecosystems are getting like a C- there at the moment. There just isn't enough. I just want to be clear that that's great inflation. Great inflation. I don't know. I feel like a C- is a strong, like, you tried. You didn't try a lot, but you did...

Try. You filled out all the answers on the test. Which is just... You did the whole Scantron. C, C, C. Yeah. Well, and the other problem we have there is that these were all supposed to be... Device types are supposed to work in one platform or on two platforms or three platforms or up to five platforms. So when you add something to Google Home, you should then be able to put it in Samsung SmartThings relatively easily. That process...

Not in every case, but in a lot of cases has been very difficult, doesn't always work, and frustrating to use. And that is where I would say they get a D for that kind of interoperability. And the CSA basically came along and said, we actually have to fix this and tell you how to do it because you're not doing it yourself very well. Yeah. Can I just make that very real for listeners? What you're describing is I set up my house in...

Apple Home on my phone, right? Here are all the rooms in my house. There's a bedroom, there's a bathroom, there's a garage, there's a front door, whatever that is. And then the second I want to use that in Google Home or Samsung SmartThings, I got to do it all again, right? Like that level of interoperability just doesn't exist anywhere. Well, and not completely do it all again. Like that's what you used to have to do. You used to have to then like

you know, reset up a device entirely. But now there is some communication. So you go into your home, Apple Home app, you take a code and then you go into your SmartThings app and you paste that code in. And that's supposed to make it, that's,

slightly fewer steps than it would have been prior where you might have to link to your Samsung account and connect to the cloud and put in your password and your username and then sync the devices and rename the devices in your platform, your new ecosystem. So there's some fewer steps with Matter Multi-Admin and it's all working locally. No cloud dependency, no need to sign up for an account.

Well, I mean, you need to sign up for a Google Home or a Samsung account, but depending on the platform you're using. But what we're not getting yet, what they've promised us now, and that's coming hopefully, coming soon is a theme of this for sure, is that you're going to be able to, when you set something up in Google Home, if you've already authorized Samsung SmartThings,

it will automatically show up in that other platform, which is how it should have worked from the beginning. That's how everyone assumed it was going to work. Like, this is how interoperability should work. And that is something that they've said that they are working hard on and that we should see hopefully next year. So I don't know, maybe a C for effort. Jen, you're so kind. I'd be too kind. C for effort?

Did you guys get effort grades in school? No. Completion grades. My kids get completion grades as long as you just finish the work. This is why American competitiveness is falling off the charts. Our letter grades were like the actual grade that you deserved, but then you would also get a one, two or three for effort. And a one was like doing your best,

A two was like, you're fine, you're here sometimes. And a three was like, you're not trying hard enough. And like the great accomplishment was to get like an A plus three in a class, which is like you're doing the least but crushing it. But really good. And I feel like matters effort grades could use a little work. Yeah. Well...

I know, Nilay, you look very perplexed. First of all, I was like, what are you talking about? You take the test, you get 100%, then you move on and smoke cigarettes behind the field. I was like, that was school for me. But with Matter, C for effort is a real...

I see that there is effort. I think I'm just stuck on the end. Everyone agrees on what the end product is, which is you buy whatever you want and it all works together. And maybe there's a little bit of setup. Like you need to tell the Google home like, hey, I already have a smart home.

Like there's smart lights and all these rooms, like go find them. And it needs to immediately learn everything that you've set up in whatever other system, right? You've already set up all your rooms in Alexa and you've already assigned all the lights to whatever rooms. And then you buy a Google nest hub because you want the photo frame feature. And it already just knows what you're talking about. It just feels like the industry is,

there's a negative incentive to do that. Like they don't want to, they know they have to, right. They, they know that in order for any of this to happen at scale for mainstream consumers, they've got, they've got to make this all work. They've got to make it simpler. Like none of them want to make light bulbs and light switches on their own. Like as much as I think there's probably a proprietary Apple light bulbs somewhere in a design lab, like Apple knows that's a bad product for it to make, but,

So it needs the ecosystem to be cross compatible. And indeed, I think, Jen, they basically gave HomeKit to Matter. They're like, just use this. Like, we made it. It's pretty good. Just use it. But there's still the negative incentive of we should put all of our effort into making it work all the way.

All the effort is on like, what if we lit up vacuum cleaner support? Or what if my, the only reason to use the app on my fridge is there's a button in the app that makes it make ice faster for 12 hours. Right. That's it's amazing button. Incredible button. Yeah.

And like, sometimes I'm on a couch and like, fuck yeah, more ice. Like I hit the button and like, I can't imagine that some Apple designer is going to put that button in the control set. Like it's never going to happen. Right. Like there's all this effort on doing this stuff that isn't even going to be useful stuff. And it doesn't feel like there's a lot of effort on what I think what you're calling multi admin where you just buy something and it's like, I'm in your smart house. Yeah. Like here's all the controls. It's super interoperable and like exactly what you wanted.

And that to me is like, that's not a C, that's like D minus for multi-admin effort. Yeah. Well, you're right. There's no incentive for them to do it. But if they don't make, if Matter doesn't work at its basic foundational level, then it takes...

takes away the incentive for them to use matter in the first place. Like it's a real sort of flywheel here in that they need matter because we need to make the smart home simpler. It is too complicated for people these days. You know, for most average homeowners who are looking or, you know, renters who are looking to smarten their home, it's too complicated.

And the entire purpose here is to make it easier. But it's like the swan, you know, it's meant to look all sleek and wonderful on top, but underneath it's like crazed. Because there's so much that has to happen to make it easy. It's very hard to make something simple. And it does feel like you as the user still have to know too much of that stuff. Like we just have to get to the point where...

border router is not a term a person needs to know. And it doesn't feel like we're there yet. That's what they're pushing for, though. And that's why I hear from the CSA all the time. It's like, you shouldn't need to know about what matter is. It should just work. Just like you don't need really, most people don't really know what Bluetooth is or what Wi-Fi is or what electricity is. Like, you just plug it in and it works. I just disagree. First of all, I have a number of things to say about this.

One, most people are so deeply, painfully aware of Bluetooth. Jen, I'm so angry you just bought our Bluetooth. This just completely derailed our fun holiday episode because now Nila's going to be mad about Bluetooth for an hour. Merry goddamn Christmas.

thoughts on Bluetooth. I just say like, I hear companies say this all the time. Most people should know how it works. Like, yeah, it's just magic. And it's like, dude, everybody is constantly like my Bluetooth doesn't come from my car. Like super, what is the wifi password is a thing people say every day of their lives. Like,

You're aware of this stuff. Yes. Whether or not you want to be, it's how it works. And then I think that that is a rhetorical move that in particular the matter folks use because it doesn't work. So if you knew how it was supposed to work, you knew if it was working or not, you'd be able to evaluate whether it was good. Whether it was any good. Yes. Right. And we're just at this turn where it's like, well, if we just pretend it's magic.

You will be like that magic is a little less good than the magic. I thought, and it's like, that doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't work. And that, that to me is like, I want more people to have smart. I think it's cool to have a smart house. Like,

A bunch of my house is smart. It's neat. Yeah. But it's at its best when it is invisible. But making it invisible required me to know how to make it, like, to know what I wanted to disappear. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, there's just a part where it's like, just let it be a computer. Just say this is a computer and you can use it.

And then a lot of people, I think, will dive headfirst and be like, I'm going to do some computer stuff. Well, I don't think that's – I think that's where we're going to get eventually. There will be sort of a system in our homes, just like we have an electrical panel. We're going to have a smart home panel that is controlling. But I think we have to get to the point where the use cases –

are more compelling for the average user. Like people need to want to do more than just have their lights turn on when they walk into a room. There needs to be compelling reasons to make your home smart beyond just single use cases, like having a smart lock because you always lose your keys or having a smart garage door opener because you insist on having your door open automatically as you drive around the corner. Yeah, because the button right above your head is too hard to press. Yeah.

And there are things that we're seeing coming through matter and through other areas like energy management where you could see that those kind of use cases are going to bring the smart home into sharper focus. And I feel like

Once we get to think those kind of clearer use cases that come from outside of the smart home as well, from your electricity company or your cable company who are bringing these types of features into your home, then we might start to see more mass adoption around the smart home and companies jumping into it. And that's what Matter is going to hopefully help with, making it easier for companies to understand.

come into the smart home. Like we're already seeing, and this is one area where I give them a good grade, more devices. We're not seeing, I haven't seen enough new device types like fridges and stuff, but we are seeing more, less expensive gadgets that you can go and buy that are going to work with all the smart home platforms.

So there are a lot more Apple Home compatible devices now with Matter, for example, than there were even, you know, a year ago. You can buy a smart switch for like $20 now that will work with Apple Home. That did not used to be the case. It was like $50 if you were lucky.

if you got it on sale. So we are seeing, you know, it become more accessible, I guess. Matter is helping make more gadgets more accessible. And, you know, we are also, we haven't, I am hearing some complaints from manufacturers that it is still very expensive and complicated to be a Matter device. And that's a bit of a roadblock because it's only going to work when

when there's critical mass, when there's a lot that works with Matter. Matter can't be a niche protocol like Zigbee or Z-Wave has been. It has to be more general and more mass market. Yeah, Matter can't be an upgrade. I feel like it's very important that Matter cannot cost more in order for this to work. And ultimately, you would want all this smart home stuff to be

the cost of the regular things, right? Right. Like, Nila keeps telling me how great the Lutron light switches are. Yeah. And yeah, the Caseta stuff looks awesome. Holy God, is it expensive. It's expensive. And so like, we get to a point where it's like, I'm fine with it being a little more expensive where it's like, you get more features, it should be a little more. But to like, five or 10x the price of my light switch,

in order to connect it to the internet is just, you're just going to lose almost everybody. And you know, those are actually their cheapest products. Yeah. I guess Lutron's actually in the high end. Yeah, I know. And Lutron is part of the CSA, but they have not done anything with Matter. And there's a few companies like that. They're just counting all their money. They're like, we're good. They're good. Don't worry about it. I mean, they've said to me, you know, we're just, we're here. We're talking. We want to see what it's

what value it could bring our customers. And at the moment, I guess they don't see anything, any value because they already work with all the platforms and they already work locally in your home, but you have to have a bridge. Um,

Um, so, and that's one area that Matter has failed miserably. And I give it a really bad grade is, um, being, being, getting rid of bridges and hubs and apps. That was one of the big promises of Matter. Simplicity, um, no bridges, no hubs and, and easy to set up and no. Can I use the Lutron example? Not a cape for Lutron, but, um,

We have Caseta switches, the hub, there's a hub. You have to buy a little hub. It's itty bitty thing. Right. And, and you look at it, you're like, this will never reach my entire house. But I think Lutron has their, they bought, they bought their own little slice of wireless spectrum. So they're just able to do it.

And like this little hub just like works. Like light switches are outside. They're upstairs. They're in the attic. They're in the basement. And this one hub is able to talk to them all. And most other smart home things do not do that. Like Ring, I think runs on Z-Wave and you need to put Ring extent, like little Z-Wave extenders all over your house to cover the whole house. For the security system. For the security system, for the door sensors and whatever else. And like, that's the reality of so many of these products is like,

the radio protocols if you don't have great wi-fi throughout your house matter might fall down and then you you're like well then matter is going to come with this other protocol called thread yeah which is the the radio protocol that matter should run on which is lower power and now we need to have thread border routers in home kit minis and eros and whatever else is going to have them and that stuff doesn't all talk to each other yet and you're kind of just like

Well, I get why the Lutron switch is really expensive. Right? Like this one itty bitty. It works. It looks like nothing. It looks like it shouldn't work. And it's like in a closet in my basement and it totally works great. And that's what everyone's competing with. Well, and it's kind of a shame because, as you mentioned, Matter was created with several different.

protocols, standards, and what was already there, like Apple donated HomeKit, Amazon donated FastPair, Google helped with casting. There are so many things that different companies came together to bring to Matter, and if only Lutron could have brought its... Donating your custom spectrum. Instead of Thread. I mean, Thread has its use cases in some areas. Lighting has been one area that it doesn't...

They've tried to shoehorn lighting into Thread and it just doesn't seem to be working very well. And we've been running into a lot of issues. Nanoleaf and the Cara. Nanoleaf, which was all in on Thread, has really backpedaled and has created its own protocol. Perfect. So, yeah, there have been issues with Thread. I mean, Thread was supposed...

So Matter doesn't have to work on Thread, just to make that clear. You can have Matter without Thread. You can have Matter over Wi-Fi. And in theory, Matter could work over other protocols too. We just hasn't, that hasn't happened yet. But we've got Matter, you've got, but Thread also needs a software layer. It needs an application layer. So Thread has to have Matter.

Or it can have HomeKit. Or it could have another application layer, which is, you know, so that's getting sort of into the speccy details. But you can have Matter without Thread. Thread was developed specifically to be an IoT protocol, which is, and for the smart home, which is why a lot of people put a lot of faith into it, thinking it's going to solve a lot of these problems that we've already, that we've shoehorned other protocols into, like Bluetooth. Right.

There are lots of Bluetooth mesh smart lights out there. I still see companies launching Bluetooth mesh smart lights and I'm like, why are you doing this? But Thread is supposed to, you know, it's low power, low bandwidth, mesh networking. It has all of these what sound like great applications.

attributes for a smart home. But the launch with Matter, I think, and into such a small protocol, into such a big space has caused some significant problems. And Thread released its 1.4

pro spec this year which was basically we've seen how thread's working in the real world and now here's everything we're going to fix to make it work properly and people are interested in thread like i get comments all the time on my articles like why isn't this work with thread why are there so few thread devices i want thread in my home it's reliable it works well um but it yeah it's the two together have have caused a lot of um

It's two standards working from two with, and I hear this a lot from the CSA, you know, we're a member driven organization. Lots of us are talking to create this. So there's no one person kind of leading it. And the thread group's the same. I mean, Apple, Google, Samsung, they're all part of the thread group as well. Apple and Google are all in on thread though. And I think that's why we're seeing so much momentum or so much push for thread. But you're not seeing it so much,

from the other platforms. I mean, they're long for the ride, but Apple and Google are the ones that are really pushing it. And Apple can't just do the thing it usually does, which is like, here's the new MacBook. It has no radios except for a thread radio. Right. That's how Apple drives a dot. I think it would like to do that. They would. There's random thread radios on the new phones, and no one knows why. They're doing kind of the move they usually do, but with USB-C or whatever, they were just like, yeah, we took everything else away. Right.

Like, would you like to use your MacBook? Welcome to Dongle Town. Like, they can't do that with Thread in the same way. And it feels like that's because no one can just make the push in that way. It's going very slowly. What's the line? A camel is just a horse designed by committee, right? Like, it feels like this is the camel of the smart home. It does feel like every holiday spectacular episode just ends with the slow, somewhat depressing reveal that it's just politics. Yeah.

There's a lot of politics in this one. That is for sure. How does the standard work? And it's like, people yell at each other until they die. Well, on that holiday, you know. Jen, give us a big overall matter grade, and then we're going to take a break and play some games. What do you think? Matters 2024. Wow.

I'm going to have to go with a D. Present. Present. Yeah. It showed up. It showed up. It made some effort. Okay. It got a few things right, but it's still got a lot of room for improvement. I think the D is right because it's like the grade you give...

To the kid who's like not doing great, but you kind of don't want them to be your problem anymore. So you just sort of pass them on to the next year. Wow. I feel like I've learned so much about both of your school days. I'm not saying I was that kid. I'm just saying people in history have been that kid. That they're just like, go be somebody else's problem. And it feels like that's where we are with matter. It's moving on. There's a lot of potential. I know we love this word. Yeah.

But there really is. I mean, the foundation is there. There's just a lot of building work that still needs to be done. But the vibes seem good. The people who need to think matter is going to work still think matter is going to work. Oh, yeah. I need to say you are completely wrong from your prediction. Sorry, I should have started. I hope I'm wrong, to be clear.

What was your prediction? That matter would just go away? That everybody's going to give up on matter. Give up on matter by the end of 2025. And that's not going to happen. It's here to stay. And it's going to get, you know, it's just how long is it going to take for it to get to the point where it's achieving everything it really set out to do. And I think getting there is the hard part.

There's the politics and the manufacturers. There's so many people involved, so many companies involved that, you know, the momentum needs to keep going. And you need to keep, like, cracking the whip at these companies because they're like, oh, this, because it is a good idea. I mean, it is going to help make the smart home better. But as you say, Nilay, some of these companies don't feel like there's an incentive. So we need to, you

You know, they need to know that there's an incentive, which is people want to use these devices and they want them to work well in their home. And the companies need to step up and make that happen. There you go. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and play some games and see how well we actually understand any of this stuff. Oh, my God. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.

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It's that time. It's our annual tradition to play some games around the spec that we've picked out. And also it just kind of gives me a chance as your producer to play evil games with you and make you look silly in front of everyone. So really this is my favorite time of year. - You should also play these games with your family, by the way. - Oh yeah. - Everybody told me last year that "USBC Bingo" was a big hit all around the tree. People loved it. - I love that, yeah. Okay, great. We're gonna start with the match game. - Oh God.

Please pull out your match game cards.

- This, if we give this to people to print out and they hand this out to their family. - We will be doing the CSA a big favor in educating the public. - If you'd like your family to not wanna speak to you for several days, please suggest playing this game. Okay, let me tell you how it goes. On the left of your player card, you have seven different matter-specific things. I'm just gonna be as vague as I can. And on the right, you have the descriptions

definitions really of those seven things. What each of you need to do is draw lines from the items listed on the left to the definitions on the right. We will give you two minutes to complete that. Some of these words are obviously fake. I don't think matter fabric is a real word. Let me read them out for the audience. So we've got matter device, smart home hub, matter administrator,

Matter Fabric, Matter Controller, Thread Border Router, and Matter Bridge. And you're telling me that these are all different things. These are all different things. I would have told you three of these are synonyms. These items and the definitions were pulled from the CSA website. So right from the source. All right. I'll start your two-minute timer now. Can these things be defined as themselves? There's some real tautologies here, I would point out.

All right, I'm done. Damn it, Jen. It's very messy looking, though. Okay, I think I can't say that this is easy to follow.

Mine is unhinged. I don't know why I chose curving lines instead of straight lines. Curving lines? Yeah, mine looks very... I should have just written the words next to each other. I know, I think that's what I... See what I'm saying here? This is not normal. Oh yeah, you got a little swoopy thing going on. I'm into that. Okay, is everybody done? Yes. As done as we're gonna be. Okay. I think the way we should do this is I'm gonna go to each one of the seven and...

I'll go to each one of you and you tell me what you picked. - Honor system, Jen, no cheating. - Well, I'm not gonna tell you who is right until you each answer. Okay, Matter device. Nilay, what did you pick for Matter device as the definition? - A Matter device is a smart home hardware product that supports Matter. And I just wanna be clear, these definitions are from the CSA, correct? - Yes. - The CSA has defined a lot of things as themselves.

The tautological definitions here are out of control. A Matter device is a smart home product that supports Matter. That's it. So it can be connected to and controlled by a Matter controller. Okay, great. Jen, what did you choose?

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

You are all correct. You each get three points for the correct answer. Okay, moving on. Smart Home Hub. Nilay, what did you choose for that one? A Smart Home Hub is typically a connection point in the home for multiple smart home devices, usually specific to the vendor that has provided it, which I disagree with, but that's what I picked. Yeah, it's not a great description, actually. You can tell the CSA has really shaded it. Yeah. To be like...

These suck. You should use Matter. Because it's not typically specific to a vendor. Did you go with that same answer? I did. Yes. Sorry. And David? I went with the same thing. I picked something else until the very last second and then switched to this one. Okay. Tell me what the answer is you chose again, Eli. Typically a connection point in the home for multiple smart home devices. Yeah. I missed the word typically. That is correct. You all got it right. Wow. Yay. I was not expecting this.

Oh, don't worry. The dumb ones are coming. Okay. All right. Our next one is Matter Administrator. Nilay, which one did you pick for that? An entity that can control Matter devices the user has connected. Functionality can be built into many types of hardware devices like phones, always powered smart home hubs that provide local and remote control, smart switches, buttons, or even mobile apps. I challenge the listener...

to distinguish between it can be a phone or an app on your phone. - What if your whole phone was a light switch? Think about that, Eli.

I have one phone for every app. This is good. We disagree for the first time. I had something else for this one. Oh, I had that one. That's the one you chose as well? Yes. Okay. And David, which one did you pick? I said a device or application that creates, maintains, and manages security and privileges for all device on the fabric. Okay. Which, by the way, that definition, it sounds like it came directly out of Dune. Okay.

Welcome to the fabric. We manage the fabric. All right. Our scores are finally diverging on that round. Eli and Jenna, I'm sorry to tell you, you got that one wrong. David was correct. No. No. Oh, no. You got them the wrong way around.

This is when it begins to fall apart. Yes. All right. Because matter controllers are the ones that manage the security. I'm not going to lie. As soon as Jen disagreed with me, I instantly put an X next to my thing. I was like, there's no chance. You should have been. You should have been. You need to double check this one, Liam. Okay. We will have our judges. But you're right. So matter admins and matter controllers are...

Very, very, very, very close together. I'm hearing so many excuses now. No, but matter... No, you understand a matter... This is what a fabric... A matter administrator is just a bureaucrat in the government. And a matter controller controls the spice. Please, my father was a matter administrator.

Do you understand? Okay, moving on. Matter Fabric. Nilay, which one did you pick for Matter Fabric? Who knows, man? This is the one that I think the CSA is trolling us by defining the thing as itself. So a Matter Fabric. Matter devices are connected together on a virtual network within a home called a Matter Fabric. Yes. A virtual private network over which Matter devices, admins, and controllers communicate with each other. Yeah, Liam, I think you straight up put the answer in the front. Yes.

Yeah, as soon as I saw that. This is a, we call this a host error. It's like when Ken Jennings just says the name of the thing when he's giving the clue on Jeopardy. I apologize to the audience. Did we all get that one right? Did everyone get that one right? We all got that one right. All right, that was a freebie. Fabulous. Three points for all. I just want to point out, I'm crushing it right now. My confidence is through the roof. It's all the hat. It's the hat. It's all the hat. It's bringing you good vibes. All right, MatterController.

Eli, which one did you choose for Matter Controller? Why do I always go first? I chose... Because it's easier for me to score. I see. Matter Controller is a device or application that creates, maintains, and manages security and privileges for all devices on the fabric. Wrong. Which I believe is what Jen would have picked. Yeah, that's what I went with. Because we are correct.

David, what did you pick? An entity that can control Matter devices the user has connected. Functionality can be built into many types of hardware devices like phones, always-powered smart hubs that provide local and remote control, smart switches and buttons, or even mobile apps. Just for the listener.

Right. Take this out of the weird bureaucracy of a bunch of nerds designing a smart home standard and take this again into your favorite sci-fi fantasy world. Dune, for example, which I keep referencing. Who has the higher rank in Dune? The administrator or the controller? See what I'm saying? Makes sense to me. It's interesting.

Yeah. I do feel like the administrator is the one who gets to press all the buttons though. The controller like stands behind their chair and yells things, but the administrator is the one who's like getting stuff done. Yeah. The controller is obviously Palpatine. Yes. Correct.

But like, who has somehow the truck? Does it have any real power? Think about that. Oh, yeah. You know what? The difference here, and I didn't actually read this properly, is that it says device or application, whereas for the matter administrator, it says an entity. So a matter controller... Like a ghost? Yeah.

An entity is definitely above a controller and an administrator. Matter entity is what's truly in charge here. The floating spirit of matter. This is, although it does say, actually, if you see at the bottom of that one, an entity, it does say, or even mobile apps. So it's also applications and apps.

And apps. Both of these definitions are just like, they do some stuff, whatever we want. I don't know. They're basically the same thing, which they are essentially the same thing. It's just a controller needs to be a physical device. No, that's not true. I know. Well, so they originally said that apps could be controllers, but that has actually changed. And apps can't be controllers on their own. They can only be administrators. So these are actually out of date. Yeah.

And the CSA's website. You're getting away with so much because you have that accent. And I want you to know. But yeah, if you read both of these descriptions are exactly the same. Yes. The story of matter. It's a thing for matter devices is the answer to every single one. But I'm just so excited that the man who said matter is not going to exist in a year is the one that's going to win the quiz. Yes.

I'm just saying right now our disagreement does not, it just, the root of this disagreement is whether you think an administrator is a higher rank than a controller.

That's what it is, right? A controller is just like, you can turn the lights on and off. An administrator is, you can kick people out of the fabric. Nelai, I'm the entity now. Holy ghost. It's Christmas. All right, let's keep going. Yeah. Well, for the purposes of scoring, I want to make it official that Dave got that one right. Nelai, Jen, I'm sorry. But I would, I'm just pointing out that the Connectivity Standards Association got it wrong. Yeah.

This is how Nilay got hundreds on his tests, by the way. Just argued my way through. Put on arguing. We've got two more. Two was wrong. We've got two more. The next one, our favorite, the Thread Border Router. Nilay, which one did you choose for that? Another one that appeared to be a tautological definition. A Thread Border Router enables Thread devices to connect to the local network so they're able to communicate with other IP-based devices built on technology such as Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Yes. What'd you pick?

That one. Same one? David? Yes. This was the closest I came to getting one wrong because I'm a genius. And again, there are going to be two in a row that sound very much exactly the same, but I said the same thing. Okay, great. You all got it correct. Three points for everyone.

Last one, MatterBridge. MatterBridge translates from one protocol to another, allowing non-matter smart home devices, such as those using Zigbee or Z-Wave, to connect to what else? A matter fabric. Fabric. And that was all that's left, so. Yeah, it was. We got that one right. David.

This holiday season, connect to the fabric. Connect to the fabric. Go home to your families. Connect to the fabric. We are all one on the fabric. This is what a perfect score looks like. Look at that. Yeah. We're going to appeal to the higher power, Nilay. To the entity. To the entity. I will get the CSA to fix their website.

Yeah, that's how you really win the test. You're like, I changed the book. You instantly win if you can change. But you have to do it before this episode publishes. Those are the rules. Okay. Look, I can see the argument for administrator outranking controller, but I'm just saying in the Dune universe, the controller, you know, that's like a heavy word. Administrator is never a heavy word.

It just is. You're like, I'm an administrator. It's like, great. Get out of here, gray suit. I'm not talking to you. The border routers are just those weird planes that just take people around. That's a border router. It doesn't do anything. It just kind of crashes occasionally. The drones. The drones over in New Jersey are border routers.

Exactly. I think we can all agree what we learned from this game is that matter is way more complicated than it might seem at first. Spice must flow. The spice must flow. All right. We're gonna move on to our second and final game. Uh, but before we do, I wanna just quickly let our fans know what the scores are thus far. David is dominant. Nilay Patel has 12 points so far as does Jen Tui.

And David is leading the pack right now with 18 points. I will say just very quickly, having looked at the next game, this is still up in the air. David's lead is not safe. I also want to make it clear that I know very little about Dune. I watched both of those movies. I slept through the first one. The second one was better. Never read the books. Please do not quibble with me about Dune.

It's very important to me. Quibble with the CSA. But only on Dune-related grounds. Send them notes about Dune. Yeah. Okay, we're going to do Matter Mad Libs.

If you're not familiar with Mad Libs, Mad Libs is a pre-written sentence with a bunch of blanks in it and a bunch of choices for those blanks for you to fill in to make the sentence complete and make sense. So I'm going to read out the sentence and the word choices, and we'll give you two minutes to fill them in just like last time. No looking while he reads it. No starting early. Formerly known as blank, blank is a unified connectivity standard developed by the blank.

The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices regardless of brand or platform. It works through blank, blank, and blank, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Matter's key advantage is that it uses a standardized blank. Matter lets you blank and use its devices across blank for more choice and control so you don't end up stuck on one platform.

Your word choices are: ecosystem or ecosystems, Bluetooth, Matter, IP protocol, Wi-Fi, chip, thread, CSA, and pair. Matter lets you blank should be the official tagline of the CSA. All right, we starting? Yeah, real Verge Cast nerds know the first one because Dieter thought it was very funny. I have a question.

It works through blank, blank, and blank. Does the order matter? No. I do have a correction for that one too for you. It's so funny. I wanted to run these by you, but then I was like, but I need her to play the game. That wouldn't be fair. Which word am I missing? I'm not super confident. Okay, I'm ready.

Okay, it's looking like everyone is done. Let's reveal our answers. I'm going to go one at a time, slightly different order. Let's start with you, Jen, if you could read out the sentence you completed. Okay. Formally known as CHIP, MATA is a unified connectivity standard developed by the CSA.

The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices, regardless of the brand or platform. It works through Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Matter's key advantage is that it uses a standardized IP protocol. Matter lets you pair and use its devices across ecosystems for more choice and control, so you don't end up stuck on one platform.

Nailed it. All right. I can't tell you what you got yet. Next, we'll have David. Okay. Now nervous. Formerly known as Chip, Matter is a unified connectivity standard developed by the CSA. The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication. By the way, you should have made all those blanks and just made us fill them in. Reliable, secure, and seamless, I legitimately think we all might have gotten with no prompting. It's just the most tech companies speak of all time. Anyway,

The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices, regardless of the brand or platform. It works through thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Matter's key advantage is that it uses a standardized ecosystem, which I think is wrong. Jen sounded wrong. Matter lets you pair and use its devices across IP protocol, which also sounds wrong. I think Jen is right, for more choice and control so you don't end up stuck on one platform. Okay. And Nilayi?

What's yours? I was also correct, and I had the exact same answers as Jen. Well, that worked out great for me last time, so... Formally known as Chip Matters, unified connectivity standard developed by the CSA, blah, blah, blah. Other sense, it works through thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, so it can be added to devices that support any of these protocols. Key advantage is you use a standardized IP protocol that lets you pair and use its devices across ecosystems for more choice and control, so you don't end up stuck on one platform, and you can please the controller.

Did we all write thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth in that order? Yes, because I think we all immediately thought of thread first. Just apropos of nothing, that's kind of wild. And then three blanks, three obvious answers. We know it's thread. We're like, well, Wi-Fi's there. And they're like, fucking, is it Bluetooth? Bluetooth is not a protocol of matter. It's only an onboarding protocol. The other one is Ethernet.

Liam, I want to, for the listener, Liam has had no response to this information. Liam's not listening. I've never seen anyone, anyone just like nothing. Like the most nothing just happened. Jen's over here angling for extra credit. Extra credit. I've got to be David. I've never seen anyone react less to anything than Liam just react to that. Sorry.

I was scoring. No, that's not happening. That didn't happen. Nope. Nope. I mean, to be honest with you, that is mostly how I deal with you in day to day. So it's an effective strategy. All right. Listeners are a winner of this round is Jen.

and Eli, who got every answer correct. However, David got a little messed up there in the end. Yeah. He flipped ecosystem and IP protocol. You know how sometimes you say something out loud and you're like, that wasn't it. Yeah. It was... Yeah. But sorry. Use as a standardized ecosystem is just like not... That's not it, guys. I hear you confuse ecosystem and IP protocol all the time.

I mean, if I had a nickel, man. Day to day, you're in the verge. Hang on, let me send you that over ecosystem. It's like, it happens constantly. The last protocol I know is Ethernet. Bluetooth is just an onboarding protocol. Which I said first, if you guys remember. I was the first one to bring that up. So, I had not planned for this, and I should have, but... Did we tie? We have a tie. A three-way tie. Yay! Wow.

So you're all winners with 39 points. First one to get away from the desk and return with a matter device wins. Jen could do it without standing up. That's my phone. My phone, which is technically a matter controller. Jen already has two. Jen has two. Wait, okay, you showed up with a smart lock?

You know, you can get up. All right, Jen wins. Jen wins. Jen wins. Fair enough. And I have them all. I thought I was being so smart with the phone thing, and she showed up with the... Yeah, Nila's like, I've subverted the system, and Jen is like, I have all the devices. I have them all. I have another one. Just...

Jen probably has an example of all seven of the items from the match game on her desk right now. So. Wow. There you go. Wow. Well, thank you for joining us for another fun round of games. Jen, you are our winner this year. I'm not sure what that means yet, but we'll just do something special. It means she's the new controller.

Jen is the entity now. I'm the admin. Verge cast controller. What am I? Jen runs the fabric now. I'm the fabric master. I'm the fabric master. That is it. There it is. Done. Tell the CSA. It's done. It's been decided. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk with Paulus from Home Assistant about the future of all of this. We'll be right back. Support for the Verge cast comes from Select Quote.

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All right, we're back. We have a guest.

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

It's very good. So we ask you... It's a serious smart home nudge. It really is. It is truly, like, it is both very on-brand and very good. I'm very happy to have it. So can you just describe...

what you do a little bit. We asked you to come on here because you work on and created Home Assistant and we're going to talk about Matter and all this stuff, but your sort of purview and job title has actually changed a bit recently. So can you just sort of describe the shape of that for us? Yeah, right. So I'm the president of the Open Home Foundation. This is a

relatively new foundation. We started in April. It's now the owner of the Home Assistant open source project. It's the owner of the ESPHome open source project. And a bunch of other open source projects that are kind of, the other two are built upon. Our goal is to really build a smart home, build around privacy, choice, and sustainability. So we built that, we're doing that by building technology. So in a way how Mozilla builds Firefox, we are building Home Assistant, ESPHome,

We are, just by existing, we are influencing and steering the IoT market. I feel like, you know, Google, the Apples, you see that they look at us, we talk to them, we know that they know what we are doing, and they kind of take that into consideration or like they learn from that. Their product managers will talk to people in our community. So,

We are maybe not the biggest smart home platform out there. We are the biggest open source project in the world and also the biggest open source smart home platform, but we have a lot of influence in the market that way.

You're definitely the biggest super nerdy smart home assistant. I think that's a fair place to say. We actually tell people, we're never anyone's first smart home platform. Everybody starts with Google and Amazon or Apple smart home. And then when they outgrow it for whatever reasons, privacy, more integrations, they want history, they will come to a home assistant. And then there's people like Nilay that go to hoops.

Oh, got that one in too. That's rough. By the way, switch from hoops to home bridge. We can get into it later. That will be the next holiday special. Garage door openers. God help us all. But wait, actually, garage door openers are like the thing, right? This is how I think about Home Assistant. There are all of these disparate smart

devices in your house, most of them cannot talk to each other. Yeah. The plan is for Matter to fix it on some timeline. And in the meantime, you have products like Home Assistant and HomeBridge and everything else that is basically the fanciest middleware to bridge everything into one platform and then expose control to your smartphone in some way. And that seems...

Like it will never be defeated. Like in my mind, Home Assistant will never be defeated, even if Matter shows up and works perfectly. Because every time I use my smart home, there's one thing that isn't going to work on Matter.

Whether that's the garage door or whether it's the toaster or whatever it is, it's easier to bridge that into a common platform and then send it out than to be like, I will replace everything with a Matter device. Yeah. But Matter will help Home Assistant too, right? It'll make it a lot easier for Home Assistant to exist and to do these integrations, correct? I mean, it's not a direct competitor in any way. Oh, no, not at all. It's helping grow Home Assistant. Is it helping, Jen? No.

Let's ask Paul. Is it helping? What a good poll question. At its core, like Matter is a local standard, right? It allows devices to talk locally to the smart home hub. There is no previously like, or even today, there's like vacuums that will just only talk to the cloud. You have an app, you're standing next to the vacuum. You go through the cloud back to the vacuum. Your internet is down. You cannot start your vacuum like a room or something because it just, the cloud is necessary. With Matter,

Your phone will talk through Home Assistant locally and Home Assistant will talk directly to vacuums. This is coming, by the way. This is not theoretically... We're waiting on that one. You'll hear me say this a lot. This is going to be theoretically the promise because a lot of this is not there yet. But yeah, we're going to be able to talk locally to these devices. So I think in general it is...

Because for the first time in history, there's a smart home standard. And this gets a little bit nerdy, but it works over IP, right? So it means you have Wi-Fi, which we all have in our houses. You can already run Matter. And that means that out of the box, without extra radios, an Android phone, an iPhone can work with Matter. And everybody has the Google Home app. Everybody has the Apple Home app.

because they're pre-installed, which means that all of a sudden, if you need to make a business case, why am I going to choose Matter? Well, there's I don't know how many billion smartphones in the world that's all Matter supported, right? So, oh, I'm going to use Matter, which means there's going to be a lot more devices that can work locally. Would you say that Matter is... So the way that Matter came in guns blazing was, you know, one protocol to rule them all. I feel like you don't agree with that. I may be wrong. LAUGHTER

Are the other protocols, do they still have a space here or is Matter going to? Right. Well, that's, I mean, disclosure. There's other smart home protocols and I'm on the board of the Z-Wave Alliance, right? Which is one of these other protocols. Wait, can you tell me if you guys are working on building a giant headquarters shaped like a Z? This is the only thing the Z-Wave Alliance should do.

Not that I'm aware of. But for example, if you look at like, you know, Z-Wave works with QR codes that you pre-set up some device and it doesn't work over IP. And if you buy a house, Wi-Fi is not pre-installed, right? You always bring your own Wi-Fi router, but you cannot set up a matter device without a Wi-Fi router.

So if we're thinking about, I want to have a smart home pre-installed with stuff because that's how I want to sell it to new people that move into homes, that currently today does not work with Matter. So just purely on that fact, we need more smart home standards to kind of make that bridge and have that onboarding. Now, can everything be eventually one day solved in Matter? Yes. Will this take a long, long time? Also yes. Yeah.

One of the things that I'm curious about with Home Assistant in particular is that it is the central platform, right? To me, the big mistake of the smart home for quite a long time has been the idea that we need to move it out of our houses and into someone's cloud, right? I mean, so many devices I have effectively rely on some cloud service to operate, even to turn on or off.

And the idea that I should have a server in my basement that actually runs my home and connects to everything, it seems very powerful. It also seems, and I'm sure Jen has this experience all the time, when you talk to anyone about that idea, they're like, that's too hard. No one will ever do that. But then you're describing, well, we need to pre-build houses with smart homes in them, with smart home stuff in them. And you kind of end up right back at, well, there needs to be a server in the basement so I can just sell that with the house. How do you square all of that?

Because that's what I want, is to say my house has a computer in it, and I can just go look at that computer and tell you if it's working or broken, which is what Home Assistant provides for a lot of people. But that's not where the market is at all. Right. And I think that the problem that we're seeing in the market is that the moment you standardize something, it's commoditized. You cannot innovate. We look at...

So people will go through the cloud to get these fancy effects are going. I think the server is just a box nowadays, right? Like you look at your Philips Hue hub, like that's a server. It's a small server, but the Home Assistant server, for example, is not that much bigger. You don't need to rack. You don't need more than two watts to power like a Home Assistant box. So yeah.

I think we have to, just like how we have electricity meters, how we have routers, how we have cable modems, I think having a device there to run your smart home is

is the future. And, you know, I talk to other people and they say, well, you're going to have a box that runs your AI agents, right? Like you don't have that in your fridge. You have a box that can power all the AI and all the different devices. Do you think that Matter makes it more likely that we will end up with more people having a local server, whether it's just a Raspberry Pi or not? Like,

You describe Matter as a local protocol. That sort of implies that you're going to have some thing in your house that will run everything. I think so, yes. I think that there are players that are trying to push all the Matter data to the cloud where they do all the processing. But I believe that most people are also seeing ongoing cloud costs. The industry is starting to realize a little bit. You see Google, they're pushing some stuff local. Samsung is pushing some stuff local.

they they see the speed um i mean maybe this is more wishful thinking from my ends because this is where i wanted to be but um yeah i hope it goes there yeah i am really curious how you're thinking about matter as a as a product guy right now because on the one hand

You work on Home Assistant, which is for people who are like, by and large, willing to do a little bit of work to make this stuff work. And to Nila's point, like you eventually hit a point with the smart home stuff where you either have to do this or you have hit the ceiling of what you can do in a smart home. Yeah.

What Matter seems to promise is it sort of lowers the barrier to entry at the very bottom of it. The thing Jen keeps telling me every time we come on the show and I get sad about Matter and she tells me it's going to be fine is it just makes all of this easier. It makes building a smart home from nothing work, and that's very powerful. And I think just in terms of getting people into this market, that's really valuable. But for you specifically...

Like I went through and read a bunch of the documentation and forum posts about Matter over the last year or so. And the response is so funny because it's a mix of people being like, oh, this sounds cool. And a bunch of people being like, well, I don't care about any of this. This is also no problems that I currently have. So I am curious, like how relevant does Matter feel to something like Home Assistants?

So I think it is relevant and it's mainly like the IP-based thing, the Wi-Fi-based. Matter can have cameras. None of the other smart home standards can have cameras. Vacuums have never made it to Z-Wave or Zigbee and they will probably never come. Like Z-Wave is honestly more like a home security standard, right? They have all the sensors. It's

Zigbee is similar setup. Matter is actually kind of skipping some of these sensors, which is why sometimes in the smart home industry, people are annoyed with like, oh, it doesn't even do energy monitoring. And like, well, right now that is slowly coming. But in the meantime, cameras are coming, right? And like vacuums have launched as specification, not yet as firmware, but there's no product yet, but...

Yes, we've been deep into this. We've launched the idea of vacuums. So I think there's a lot of good stuff coming out of the, just Matter can do devices differently because they have more bandwidth.

Now, I think when we talk about matter, there's this... I keep saying IP and Wi-Fi because those are the good parts of matter. There's the threat part of matter. And you can do a whole episode about that is...

a pretty bad shitshow. Like that's just... Wait, Thread's a shitshow? Yes. Why is Thread a shitshow? Yeah, give us the three minutes on that. So when they started Thread, they decided that with Wi-Fi, it's too hard that people need to set up a network name and a password and that's then printed on the router cable modem and people have to go dig into it and see it. And so they decided...

We're not going to let people deal with this. We're going to create automatically a thread network, configure a name and a key, and then we'll just send it to all the devices. And you never have to know the network name and the network key. Then the second part is it's a standard. Everybody's going to be able, it's a matching standard. Everybody's going to create border routers. So you're going to have like five border routers, one from Apple, one from Google, one from Samsung, one from Home Assistant. They all need to have this network key.

The third part is now we need this network key that you set up, for example, in your Google Home or your Apple Home to the Home Assistant Hub or to the Samsung Hub. They forgot that part. I'm so glad you explained it. You explained it so well, Pals, because it is so confusing. But yes, this is where we've all ended up with multiple thread networks in our home, and so devices aren't connecting. The best part about doing shows with you, Jan, is you say things like, we've all ended up with multiple thread networks in our home.

And it's true. I think the average American, when I look at these election results, they are pissed about having multiple thread networks in there. I have multiple thread networks. But this is like, I see the like bits and bobs, right? Of like, we're going to start sharing network keys in the Eero app.

Yeah. Are you just saying that's not coming to anything? I mean, they're trying to fix it now, but nobody really wants to open up enough. So, for example, there's a new threat credential sharing that the Threat Group and the CSA have kind of collaborated on. But it's not anything more than just sharing QR codes to documentation and how you can get your credentials and copy-paste it into the next app. There are iOS and Android APIs. They just don't work. Right.

And Home Assistant is one of the few ways you can actually manually force all of your ThreadBorder routers to work together. But it is a process and it's not necessarily, you know, one we would recommend to anyone.

or the people that voted. Yeah. And it's not going to be successful. Wait, so I guess I have a question for both of you expressed in different ways. And Paul, it's certainly you because you represent the Z-Wave Alliance, the bitter rivals to Thread, I believe. The evil empire. I'm so mad that there's not a Z-shaped building. You have a bias in favor of the Z-Wave Alliance. I have a bias in favor of novelty buildings. Yeah.

But like when I think about matter, when we work with Jen on coverage of matter devices, thread is just a long further ride, right? It's just like when these things happen together, then the big unlock happens, right? You can just go to the store and buy anything and you get matter over thread and you get this low power, power saving network that automatically heals and it can reach everywhere in your house. And you're saying that's just not happening.

It is only happening if you stick to an existing, like a single ecosystem. So if you have everything Apple or everything Google, you're going to have a good time. But the truth is, is that the smart home doesn't work that way, right? We have this piecemeal together of equipment we have bought over the years. And you can't just ask somebody, throw away everything, buy everything Google. Now you can use this lock. Right. That's the problem we're trying to solve. Paul, are you telling me we've solved no problems? No.

Not yet. Okay. This is the thing. I think they are aware of it and they're like, the thing is, you have all these companies together and they are, they have all these, you know, their businesses, right? They want to make money. They want to protect their ecosystems, but they are also part of an alliance that creates an open standard about sharing these things. And so,

So trying to find that balance is hard. And we see companies where their border router has bugs. They know that these bugs exist with other platforms. When they exist themselves, their smart home controller talks directly to the border router bypassing the normal route so people don't experience the bugs in their own ecosystem.

But we are all experiencing these bugs where you step out of that ecosystem. So what is the Matter Protocol like to work with right now? I mean, one thing Neil and I have spent a lot of time this year talking about ActivityPub, another of like everybody's favorite protocols that will save everything. And has shipped no products. Yeah, right. And we keep talking to people who are like, this protocol is full of good ideas. It wants to do all the right things. And it is...

just fundamentally, like somewhere between unfinished and broken in a bunch of really important ways. And they're all like, we'll get there someday, long history, sweep, whatever. Is Matter like a good technical protocol at this point? Yes, mostly. So the good thing about Matter is that they actually took everything from Zigbee. They took everything they learned from HomeKit. They took everything from Google and Amazon. And they all said, you can use all our stuff, all our knowledge. We're not going to like...

Like, just let's build the best thing ever. And they built something that is very good. For example, they built into it that every Matter device can be connected to five different smart home hubs at the same time. And from the Home Assistant app, you can share a Matter device to Google Home. And now Google Home can control the device and has its own encrypted secure connection.

the downside of all these adding the best features that they could think of is, okay, now we need bigger chips in our light bulbs because we need to have five encrypted connections to these five smart home bulbs. And so, and then like the SDK started kept growing, right? And so there's now more memory. And so these, the light bulbs are getting more expensive or, or,

Matter, you set it up with a QR code, but that QR code is only for the first time you set up the Matter device. Afterwards, you have to go to, for example, Home Assistant and share it to Apple or to Google. You cannot use that QR code again. But people don't know. They just use the QR code all the time, right? So security gets in the way of usability there. And so there's a lot of good stuff just at the pure foundational level of authentication onboarding.

But we get to like the layer of like, oh, how good is it for energy monitoring? All this. I think that stuff will come. Like that just takes time for people to agree. Then, of course, I mean,

I feel like Matter, it gets a little bit overhyped. They release a new specification. Everybody makes all these articles, right? Like Matter 1.4 is here. 1.3 is there. Jen's right here. You can just say it to Jen. She's right here. I don't say nice things about it always, though. She's smiling in that way. British people smile when they're pissed off.

It works in Home Assistant usually, by the way, within two weeks. But then device manufacturers are like, well, I'm not going to release a MatterFirmware for my vacuum because there's no controller supporting vacuums. And then the controllers are like, why am I going to add vacuums if there's no products that use vacuum? And so everybody's kind of looking at each other and kind of figuring it out. And at some point, somebody breaks the dam, right? And then like, oh, now we're having MatterVacuums because that is a thing. And I mean, yeah.

Yeah, so this is there. It takes a while for something to be added to Matter and be available as a Matter product that you can use. I feel like I'm learning a lot about the politics of the smart vacuum industry without having learned anything. But let me, can I just ask you a question? Like the dream, like what we talk about is you buy a bunch of stuff, you plug it into your house, and then you're just able to sort of control it from anywhere. Yeah. My Google Home, I should just be able to say, turn on the lights in the kitchen and it just knows. Yeah.

I'm not setting up a floor plan on five different platforms, which is the thing you end up doing now. Yeah. You know, I can, my wife won't use anything unless it's control center on her iPhone. No other smart home platform exists except control center on the iPhone. So that is why I prioritized a bunch of stuff I prioritize. But I know that home assistant has much smarter automations.

Right. And in a variety of ways, I know that Google and Amazon want to throw AI at a bunch of automation ish things that they keep talking about. I would love to use that stuff and try it out. And that's, to me, that's what matter is supposed to do. Right. It's just show me all the devices everywhere without a ton of complicated setup. And it, uh, what I'm getting from you is that is we're not close to that. You still need a central platform and all these things can talk to a central platform.

Do you think that's going away? Is there a timeline for Matter solves that and evaporates the central platform? I think that it will never go fully away because the moment something is part of Matter, it is standardized, it's commoditized, you cannot innovate. And so there's companies that drive on innovation. They want to push the boundaries and that will never be able to be fully captured in Matter. So you're going to have extra systems with their own APIs and that goes into Google, into a home assistant system.

And then how do you get it from Google into Home Assistant? You cannot. Anything that's in Home Assistant, you can push to Apple, you push to Google. That is all integrated correctly. So I don't think it's going fully away. It's just that more and more...

default things in a way. So light bulbs or logs, those will all go over Matter. And the more complicated things like media players, that's a hot mess. Pausing, playing, that's fine. But browsing your library and putting on your Christmas playlist, there's no way that's going to be a Matter thing.

in the next five years or ever. - But do you think, this is actually a thing I've been wondering about a lot because I saw something that was like, when Matter comes to TVs, that's when everything's getting, I was like, okay, I don't even have time to think about this. - I think we wrote that article too, I just wanted to be clear. - Yeah, no, we probably did. But I've started wondering, there's a version of the thing that you just described where it's like Matter sort of handles the very basics and then there's interesting competition and innovation on top of that.

That actually strikes me as a not terrible outcome. That's the whole point, really. But then there's another version of it. But then the question on top of that, right, is how much do you push down into that protocol? And I just, I wonder what that balance looks like over time, because the question of like, what is an interesting innovation that I did and what should just be baked in by default to every one of these devices feels like the most straightforward

sliding scale, slippery slope of all time. You know, we're a member of the CSA Alliance, which is the alliance that makes Matter. And when you go to these member meetings and you talk to people, they want to put everything in Matter, right? Like, oh, manage your wireless router. Manage like, because that connects to Matter in a way. Your wireless router should be part of Matter or everything that is...

electronics in your house should be part of Matter, they believe. The vision is we have solved onboarding, commissioning of devices and sharing devices between smart home controllers. We can use that as a base layer of, well, smart home is the first thing, maybe wireless routers. Well, you could consider that smart home, but maybe your car will be Matter. Who knows?

Yeah, I think who knows is the right answer. Jan, go ahead. It is the fundamental foundation that they were trying to fix. And then it does feel like it's maybe got a little ahead of itself. But it sounds like what you're talking about from the technical perspective is that that foundation is solid. And it works. And it does as it's said on the tin. Yeah.

It's just that when we bring the interoperability side or the platforms, the different app, the different manufacturers who all are implementing things in different ways, and perhaps that's where we're seeing some of this friction and difficult user experiences. So it's really...

And Home Assistant, it seems from my perspective, watching what's changed with the company over the last year or two, is Matter is actually helping push Home Assistant to become more of a mainstream platform and not just the way you connect.

that couldn't connect to HomeKit. So that, in that sense, Matter is succeeding in its goal, which is give it a simple foundation that every smart home device can use, and then companies can innovate and build experiences on top of Matter. Is that, I mean, would you say that's- Yeah, I mean, that would be very nice. Well, can I, I just have these like extremely dumb questions. Yeah. Like what is a smart home? Like that's where my brain is. Yeah.

It feels like the product that everyone's trying to build is a smart home, not a light switch. And none of this stuff has solved the problem of where in the computing landscape is your home. Like as a product, it's just how do we shove a bunch of stuff together? Like to me, the big unlock of the smart home is that when we wake up in the morning and a little sensor in our hallway detects motion, the lights in the kitchen turn on.

And you can't buy that out of the box. Like I had to be like, this is what I would like to have happen. I need a Philips Hue Hub that has adaptive lighting that like all the way down to where will I program this logic of sensor is on after sunrise and lights go on in this mode. And I had to figure all that out.

And it feels like Matter doesn't solve that. It just puts all the devices somewhere such that someone else can solve that. But that seems like there will be no demand for a million Matter devices unless anyone can articulate the value of having a bunch of smart devices. Well, I think this is where Google and Apple show what they want, right? They want to be competing on who can make a smart home platform.

They don't want to make light bulbs. There's no margin on light bulbs, right? So it's a bit like those Android TVs you can buy. But once you start putting a bunch of DRAM in the light bulbs, it feels like. I just can't stop thinking about the sentence, we need more chips in the light bulbs. Like, I just can't. That is in my brain forever. Apple's going to be like, this eight gigs of memory in the light bulb will cost $500. Yeah.

That's why your Apple watch is as powerful as the first iPhone. This is like my light bulb. Anyway, sorry, keep going. So they're competing with each other. Well, they're competing on that level. So they just want, it's a bit like USB. They just want all the data and control and then they can build innovative or user-facing experiences. It's a bit like, I don't know the vendor of my light switches here that are not smart, right? Because I just use them. They work. Electricity just works. I don't know who made my cables, all that stuff.

and they just want to commoditize the light bulb. A smart light bulb should be, you just plug it in, you scan the QR code, now it's part of your smart home.

And then you're living in your Google world, in your Apple world, and do these kind of things. But of course, because homelessness is at the same level operating as Google and Apple, we bring everything together, we are seeing a huge benefit from this because we also get all that data now. Right. So here's the reveal of my little story, which is that the motion sensor in the hallway is the motion sensor in my Ecobee thermostat, which is bridged all the way into...

into all of this stuff with some, I don't even know. It's some combination of home bridge and home kit. And she's like, there's just a mess of like emergent behaviors that turn on the lights in the morning. And one day it's going to wake up and kill us all. Right. Like, I don't know exactly how that computer works, but it works. And, but it's that thing, which is like, there's already a motion sensor here and I should be able to just get at it and use it to program other stuff. And that again, like, I don't think Apple and Google see that.

Is like you're buying all this stuff with all these redundant capabilities in your house. Like turning on the light in the morning is like an incredible signal about a bunch of other stuff that should happen. Right? Yeah. Are you doing that in home assistant? Is that letting you say, okay, like as Jen is saying matter, let's you bring more stuff directly into home assistant instead of just serving as the bridge. Is that now saying, okay, we can, we can show people like,

Because now we're able to compete on the platform level with Apple and Google. We're not all trying to build custom light switches. We're going to make this smart home platform more powerful or capable or even more interesting. I mean, well, that's always the thing we've been doing, right? It's like to build on top. Like we built, getting all the devices into a single place was only because we want to build stuff on top. And we added like, you know, the APIs are open. Anyone else is...

messing with it. There's third party dashboards and automation engines and AI that's all plugging into Home Assistant because nobody else wants to, nobody wants to solve that problem of getting all that data into a single place.

I think that you're talking about like your motion sensor. That is a super interesting use case and bring it all together. Very impressive. But if you look at like... I just push buttons until lights turn on. I'm not trying to... Right. But if you look at Apple, well, I think they're more interested right now in robot arms or iPads, thingies, right? Like there's, of course...

They have different priorities, but also their apps are installed on a billion phones. So they must have like, this is the entryway into the smart home world. And just getting everything into a UI that you can control it is already like the first step. And they're happy if like the majority of the people can do that. Where in Home Assistant, you get to Home Assistant because you had a problem you couldn't solve. We can solve it for you. We give you all the knobs and tools, like it's the most extensive toolkit that

which is also what confuses people sometimes because there's so much data on your screen. But then everything is possible as long as you can dream up the solution. So, Nila, you're able to dream this up. I think the majority of the people, like our parents, they are not going to think, oh, if there's a motion sensor here, then I can turn on the light there. That will not cross their mind. So there is a gap that we need to solve in every smart home platform in a way that we can...

Tell the user, we see that you act like this every morning, or we see you doing this, or this is an idea you can do, and then they can apply it. Well, and that comes from the smart home platform. But then what Matter, I think, is going to help with is that exact problem that Nilay had was finding a device that was going to trigger his lights. So because Matter provides device-to-communication,

In your home, you can now, and this has happened now, I think Eve has devices like this that you can buy a device that has been bound already. So when you get your light bulbs, it'll come bound with a smart switch that, so then you just

put them in your house and they will work. You don't have to go through any kind of setup process in the app to get it to turn on the lights when you want it to. But then you can use an app or a smart home platform to add that extra layer like the adaptive lighting so that it turns on the lights at the right time of day to the right time of temperature. So it's, you know, you've basically got three layers. You've got the communication foundation layer, then you've got the devices. And because the device manufacturer who makes that switch and that light, they're

that can be bound together through binding can now work with all the platforms through Matter without having to have spent all of their time and resources for a small startup or an open source home platform.

Working with all these big platforms like Apple Home and Google, they can put their resources into developing a better product and then work with these platforms on top. That's like the three-layer cake, really, of what matters. That is the theory. Binding devices together has never, ever worked. Zigbee, Z-Wave, the...

The technology works, but explaining it to the user that this device publishes these signals and you can wire them up to that signal. And then now the motion sensor who's turning on the light is responsible for turning off the light because they turned it on, right? They have to turn it off. Is that a new signal? Is that built into the motion sensor? Like in Home Assistant, because we have all these different technologies, we have that feature like tucked away. Nobody ever really uses it. Let me ask a very...

Let me put, let me just try to do a metaphor here. Bluetooth was invented in 1997, right? AirPods took until 2016, right? The ultimate Bluetooth device, the thing that everybody wanted in the end.

And Apple had to make like a special Bluetooth to do it. That's a long time. That's 20 years. Yeah. Where are we? More than 20 years, right? It's 21 years. I don't think you could have like an AirPods moment for matter because you're always working with all these different devices. So yes, maybe there will be a, maybe if Apple makes a light bulb, it will work perfectly within their system. But then people need to have that

everything into one ecosystem right like apple always has the the benefit of controlling the whole stack they have your macbook they have your iphone and then your airpods and they can automatically switch and do all the magic in matter world that is just not going to happen you might have your google thread border router or you might have a zigbee light bulb that goes through your smart home system or something right if everything has to work together i think that will be hard

I remember Jen said to me, like, over a year ago, that, like, if I could just convince you to renovate your entire house all at once, this is actually a really easy problem to solve. The problem is that that's not a real thing that anyone's going to do. But you still won't be able to get a garage door, right? There's, like, the garage door companies have no incentive to use Matter. The companies I see that have a lot of incentive to use Matter are...

the big appliance companies because they, I think they do not want to suffer cloud costs for the entire life of an appliance. And then I, I think they know that a subscription fee for the garbage features they offer in their apps will never fly. So matter is great for them. They're like, your stuff's on wifi. Like the timer went off, you get a notification. We can just do this in the standard. You're good to go. Then there's the super commodity stuff like light bulbs and, and,

Those smart plug outlets and stuff where it's very hard. Everything in the middle, even the robot vacuum seems like

political drama times a thousand. Oh, for sure. Do you see that getting any better that we'll just have a base layer of commodity stuff or base level of commodity connectivity and then we're going to layer on top? Because that's what you really want. That's USB. That's Bluetooth, right? There's a base layer of Bluetooth and there's Apple being like, AirPods, special Bluetooth, but it's still Bluetooth. Yeah, I think that we will see more things being commoditized and

is at some point like robot vacuums they just keep adding more features now right now they have ai automatically creating a gallery of the pets when they photo it when they drive past vacuuming and that will never make it to matter right because they try to get you i'm okay with that i just want to say on the record i'm okay with that that doesn't need to be part of the protocol the full mugshot gallery yeah i'm good we can leave that proprietary

But we're going to see more things commoditized, but I think there will be always things. People always want to have you use their app, right? The business benefit. I've talked to garage door opener manufacturers that are not my queue and they're like, we would love to work with you, but also we have business cases and how if it's in a home assistant, all our business cases fall flat because people can just use home assistant and use everything else. And that's competing with our own business. And I'm like, yeah, but this is what users want, right?

But that's just, you know, they have to create shareholder value. So let's just cast out a year or two before we go here. I think there's the question of like, how long is Matter going to take? I think is like...

- How long is a piece of string? - Maybe the heat death of the universe, like you used to say. But I am curious, like for you, as you're thinking about even just like the next 12 months, it feels like you're describing this really interesting race where Matter is going to try to sort of contain more devices and more things while you at Home Assistant are continuing to work on making all of that stuff and everything else more accessible to more people. What does that race look like over the next 12 months?

It's a good question. I think we are, I think, you know, Matter will just keep chugging along, right? Like there will be like, you know, we'll celebrate the new specs. We'll see like one or two new devices being capable, like to be implemented. And then like, you know, in two years, three years, they will arrive. I think where Matter can shine will be energy management in the home. I think there's a lot of people talking about, I want to charge my car when it's the solar power is like, uh,

being very giving me cheap energy for example I think that's something where okay you have three four devices that need to speak matter you have a smart home controller that isn't just for smart home but is energy specific you just have a smart matter energy controller device that is just controlling your car the charger and plugs into your solar panels and just that piece can run over there I think that

With Home Assistant, we have all that data. Like I said before, we're a toolkit. We make a toolbox with all the tools. Our dream is to make more solutions, but then you need a team. Now we have a team of three people just looking at energy. And we're doing that. We're working with universities nowadays,

But that's just like years in the making to get there. So for us, we just keep chugging along, just adding all the devices as they come and see kind of what grows in our ecosystem. And are you, you're cool with being a power user thing for a while? I feel like there's part of me that says like on principle, you shouldn't have to like know what a Raspberry Pi is to be good at the smart home. But it also feels like that's just where we're going to be for a while. We have ready-made hubs, right? You can buy a Home Assistant Green, $99 and you have Home Assistant. But I think,

We always want to be power users. Now, how much of a power user you have to be, that will get lower and lower. But I don't want to... A person shouldn't start with Home Assistant. They will always... I see this whole journey of you have first five smart apps, you don't even realize you have a smart home. Then you go with Google, Apple, you run into limitations, then you get to Home Assistant. And I think that journey, it shouldn't change because...

People come to a home assistant, they have at least some knowledge, they have a problem they want to solve, and it will help them find the right tools and get familiar with the system. Well, I know one of the things you've said you're working on is that sort of spousal approval factor too, like making the smart home easier to control for the rest of the home. So like Nila's point about the Apple Control Center, I mean, having an easy interface because...

It's great if you've got someone that's willing to do the tinkering, but then to be able to, because the smart home is not personal. It's not just for one person most of the time. There are other people, whether you live with them or they're visiting, who are coming into your home that need to be able to interact. And that, I think, is a really interesting, I mean, that's something that very few platforms have really done.

successfully solved. It's a hard one. Zero, in fact. Yeah, we even thought about if we should add a survey button that users that are not the admin can give feedback to their admin what they like on the dashboard. That's good. But,

That's very good. My survey button is just my wife yells at me. I will never forget the moment that I rigged up one of the lights in our newborn baby's room. And then I turned it off with the app. And then she went in and tried to turn it on. And I was like, oh, no, you can't. You have to turn it on with the app because I turned it. And she was like, what in the holy hell are you talking about? And that was the end of my smart home. I don't have the deep inside. I just know that you screwed up. I'm sure I did. Whatever Anna said is right.

And it is correct. And Matter will fix it in 2068.

You heard it here. All right. Any any you guys have any more questions before we let our friend Paulus go? I just have one. It's just a pickup and maybe we just sort of. I'm curious. You see the whole ecosystem, right? There's the big companies doing all the big company stuff. There's a proliferation of apparently ruthless vacuum manufacturers who are going to solve this problem. Then there's this class of smart home gadget companies that seems to exist to make the commodity stuff.

like me Ross is just like smart plugs, however many shapes and sizes of smart plug you want. There's a million of them. Are those sustainable businesses in a world of matter? Like does that standard enable more of those companies to exist? Because they seem like betting on them to run my home. If I don't know if the company's going to last and the cloud server might go down and the firmware updates might never be there. And there's security problem. Like does matter solve that problem where that stuff stays more stable and those companies get to exist longer? Or is it,

They're just taking advantage of the opportunity. We need a re-stabilization. I think a lot of middle-level companies will go away. The more luxury light bulbs like Philips Hue have a reason to exist. They have quality lights, ecosystem. At the bottom of the cheaper market, it's just going to be a race to the bottom. And then it's not about you download the firmware from Expressive provides the chips, for example. They have firmware for their light bulbs. You don't need to even know about Matter. You just build this.

and it really becomes a race on logistics. Who gets it the cheapest to be in the shop when the user or a consumer is buying a light bulb? Will those companies exist? Well, if they use the Espressif firmware as is, Espressif will do the firmware updates actually, and Matter has a way to distribute these. And like, for example, Home Assistant can install Matter firmware updates.

And so we, that is a possibility. Will it work that way or should the one that actually put the expressive chip in sign off on something? I don't know. Maybe that will go wrong. It will probably go wrong. Um,

Is a light bulb very important to be secure? As in more so with matter because we're talking IP, right? Threat devices could also, certain border routers allow threat devices to talk to the internet. Bad idea. It is possible. So yeah, we need better security. So

Yeah, it's a shitshow. But you'd still be able to use that MIROS. If MIROS went out of business and it was a Matter plug, you would still be able to use that MIROS plug. And you would still be able to use it in Home Assistant because it's a local. So you wouldn't lose the functionality. But yes, there is still a lot of fuzziness around the firmware updating and how that's going to work. Because originally it was intended that it would all go through Matter. And then that hasn't.

sort of coming in. Yeah. Because that has to go through the platform. So yes, that's still an area where it's murky. We have the firmware updates working, but then there was a bunch of firmwares on the like, it's weird. It's kind of a blockchain place where they store the firmwares. That's a different story. But yeah,

It was invented when blockchains were a hype. So they have a distributed ledger. They don't call it blockchain. But that's where the firmwares are stored. But there are certain firmwares stored there that are incorrect. So we upload it to a plug and we break the plug. And then who's responsible? Like, we just got your firmware from the blockchain. Like, who put it on the blockchain? That person is, that company is responsible. But they are like, but I uploaded it to your light bulb. And

So yeah, there's firmware updates are definitely not solved yet. Who put it on the blockchain? Is that a Christmas song that needs to exist? Anyway, all right. We should let you go. We should get out of here. We're ending all of this as soon as you said it's a shit show. So don't even worry. There's no improving on that. But thank you so much for doing this with us. This was incredibly fun. Awesome. We appreciate it.

All right, we got one more quick thing to do, and then we're going to get out of here and go do holiday things. This is the Verge Cast Hotline. As always, you can call 866-VERGE11, email vergecastsattheverge.com. We love all of your questions. We are off for the next couple of weeks, but we will still be listening to every single hotline question and reading every single email.

Several times because it's just a delightful way to spend my time over the holidays. Liam, who's the sponsor for the hotline? This week's Vergecast hotline is presented by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. Beautiful. All right, Jen, I have not prepared you for what this is, but this is a thing you and I have talked about before. So I'm just going to play the question.

We'll go where we go. Sound good? Okay. Sounds good. All right. Hey there. This is Keith from West Des Moines, Iowa. I'm calling as I have been encountering a problem more and more over recent years, and this Thanksgiving, it felt like it came to a head. Over the years, I've accumulated a number of recipes online that I like, and I just threw those in a bookmark and would come back to them down the road whenever I wanted to make that recipe. But

given, you know, the way Google handles search engine optimization and referrals and all that stuff, these recipes are increasingly just no longer present. I often can find them on archive.org and can track down what they looked like in, you know, 2012 or what have you and can recover those recipes, but it feels like those

those weeds are getting more and more tenuous. I was wondering if there's maybe an app that I could be using to collect some of these recipes together with the idea being that, A, I can preserve them so I don't need to worry about losing them down the road. And then ideally, it would be something where perhaps I could put these recipes in such a format that I could use some of my smart devices to help me go through the actual process of cooking if I've rendered these recipes in a more

readable format for the devices. Anyway, I hope that you may be able to give me some leads on things that might help me so my Thanksgiving next year is a little bit more straightforward. Thank you so much. Have a good day.

Jen, you see why I've brought you this question? Yes, I feel his pain as well. So I have a couple of ideas to throw out and things that I've tried, but I'm very curious to hear for you, especially as a person who is very committed to the idea of like integrating all of this stuff into your smartphone or your smart home setup, how you're making all of this work. Tell us about your setup right now.

Um, in terms of recipes, I have been using the Samsung food app for a while that does what he's asking, which is pulls all the data and puts it into the Samsung food app. And so it's not actually a link to the recipe, although there is a link in there, but you have all the data. But the problem is the link is still there. And he, the issue he's having is he's going to these links and they've

They've gone away. So right now, the way the Samsung food apps works, depending on what app, what the format of your recipe was, it does actually pull the ingredients. So you get all the ingredients, then a separate tab has all the step-by-step instructions and then...

click and actually read the full recipe in all its glory. It also, in theory, works with things like TikTok recipes and Instagram recipes, though I've never managed to get it to do that, which seems a little more complicated. But the Samsung Food app is... And just to make this, because I love the smart kitchen, one of the main reasons I use it is because I can pull it up on...

on my smart fridge. And then I have the big screen recipe, which is key because using your phone when you're cooking and looking at recipes, it's never good. And some recipes will have this feature where you can like...

force the phone to stay open so that it doesn't lock while you're using it. Yeah, they call it like cook mode or whatever. Cook mode. Yeah, that's useful. But my absolute favorite sort of fail-safe recipe app that I've dumped all my recipes into over the years and they never go away is Paprika.

which I love. Paprika's been around forever. Has been around forever. And that's a good thing, you know, like it's still there. So my recipes are all still there. So I've been trying the Samsung food thing sort of as an experiment and it's got some interesting features, but paprika is still my go-to. And then I will pull it up on my iPad and,

I haven't found a way to pull it up on a smart display, though, which is, you know, I'm more and more getting, I've been testing the 21-inch Echo Show and for cooking recipes in the kitchen, it's like, oh, so much space. You can also like slice things on top of it. That's what we need. Honestly, I have never thought about this until right now, but a smart display that is also a cutting board is a thing that should exist and I want it very badly. Actually, Bosch did actually make that. Did they really? Yeah.

It was at CES. Can I buy it? No, it was at CES like 2018, I want to say. And it was like a projector that projected your recipe or different things onto your desktop. Yes, you're right. That's what we need. I want this. Okay, so Paprika is a really good app and is one of the ones I was going to suggest. I would just throw two other ones in. There's an app called Pestle that is also very good.

and does very similar things. And it, as far as I understand, does a really good job of pulling recipes out of TikTok and Instagram. I'm really glad you mentioned that actually because this is one of the things that I have been looking for personally. I use an app mostly for recipes called Mela, M-E-L-A. It's made by the same guy who makes Reader, the RSS Reader app. It's just like lovely and beautifully designed and it's very plain text and I really like it. But

And increasingly, I'm finding recipes I want to try on social. You see like, oh, those cinnamon buns look really good. And so the question of like, can you extract something out of that actually becomes really interesting. And I haven't played with Pestle enough to be able to say this with great certainty for myself, but I hear really good things that its ability to import a recipe from Instagram or TikTok is very good. I don't know how that's possible, though, because they're not actual recipes half the time. Yeah.

I mean, that's just some person throwing things in a bowl. It's just like 11 pounds of butter and some spaghetti. And they're like, look, it's muffins. It's like that can't possibly be muffins. I like I know enough to know that's not muffins. But people say it works. So that's one I would say. And the other one is crouton.

which is another one that people really like and has done some really interesting stuff over recent years to make itself work. And Crouton does a really good job of like making your grocery list for you. Like the, some of these apps, which I really like you, you can like meal plan inside of them. Are you a meal planner?

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

Yeah, it's a really good idea. And if you are more organized than I am, I highly recommend it. Then you'll have like two teaspoons of paprika on your shopping list. I know, there is that. And then it's like, oh, instead I'll just go to Costco and buy eight pounds of it I'll never use. And I will say, this is one thing where we've talked about this sort of Samsung vision for the kitchen. And I find it really compelling for exactly that reason, right? Because you should be able to go both ways, where you should be able to say-

here's what I want to make, tell me what I need. Or I have these eight ingredients in my fridge, what can I make with it? And it feels like Samsung is the closest to being able to do all of that kind of coherently in one place. Well, and they just actually this week announced new screens in devices, which I know we don't like the screens everywhere, but a little screen on top of your cooktop that's actually showing you your recipe as you're cooking it.

I can see use case there. And they've also made a smaller screen for the fridge. So if you like the idea of having your recipe in your fridge, but you don't like the idea of the 25-inch screen or whatever the size is, they now have the Family Hub fridge has a smaller screen. So you can – but, yeah, the screen – I thought you were saying like a fridge magnet, but it's a screen. Yeah.

Stick it on. I've seen people do that with iPads. Oh, sure. Like use them in their kitchen as recipe, to do recipes and put it on a magnetic mount. Mine goes on top of the toaster. That's where my iPad goes. I know. I'm just the dangers. The dangers of iPads and phones in the kitchen. It's a disaster of an idea, yeah.

Yeah. And I have ruined at least one magic keyboard just with spillings and things. I'm a very aggressive whisker, it turns out. And that is bad for Apple iPad keyboards. So they're like fabric-y keyboards. Yeah. But so here's my question about Samsung food is if you didn't have any other Samsung stuff, but you just wanted one of these like recipe organizers, to some extent, they're all...

same-y a little bit. They have the same kinds of features. You're just picking on like design and platforms and stuff like purely on its own. Is Samsung food good enough that you would tell people to like give it a whirl? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because it was based on Wisk, which was one of the original...

Smart recipe apps. I mean, that's basically, it is whisk. Now, it does have a lot of ads in it. That's the only downside. But if you use recipes on the internet, you're used to ads. But you can pay to get rid of the ads. And then there's a lot of recipe apps. Actually, you do have to pay for, I think paprika I had to pay for it. I think it was very expensive. I think it was like $7 or something, which at the time.

that eight years ago was quite a lot for an app. But yes, I do like it. It works well. The layout to get from the main Samsung food page to your recipes that you've saved, that's not an easy process. They're trying, there's a lot of, and a lot of recipe apps will do this, I've noticed, like

trying to show you, suggest to you what you should cook, as opposed to, I know what I'm going to cook. I need to go find my recipe. Just let me, let me at it, get rid of all the cruft. But if you're looking for inspiration ideas, you can add your food list to it. We did this whole thing on the VergeCast a while back where, you know, now they've actually made that a lot easier to do. You can just scan food and it will add it to your list. And so you can sort of say, you know, what should I cook tonight? Suggest from my list.

what food I have in my house or snap a picture of the food you have and it can suggest food recipes you could make with that food. I haven't found that useful at all. It's a neat idea. But at some point it might be easier to just type the words into a search engine. Yeah.

The one thing I haven't tried that I really want to try is apparently if you're at a restaurant and you're eating a dish that you love, you can snap a picture of the dish and it will create the recipe for you. Oh, that's cool. Which would be very neat. Yeah. That would be. For me, it would just be like, how do I make Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets in my house? That's all I want to know.

Air fryer. Yeah, it's true. I bought one and I have used it two times. And this holiday season is when David becomes an air fryer genius. It's happening. Okay. I'm excited for you. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. So Samsung food, paprika, pestle, crouton, mila. Somewhere in there is one that will work for you. Yes. It feels good. Try them all. Save recipes. Like it is true that all of these recipe sites are very fleeting. Things get weird. Visit them. Look at them.

Print them out. Print them out. They need your clicks to exist, but save the recipes because they will not be around forever. All right, Jen, thank you for doing all of this. People should know we basically sprung this entire thing on you last minute and then you won the game, which is incredibly rude. But thank you for doing this whole thing with us. This was very fun. It was really fun. I enjoyed it. It was a lovely way to celebrate the spectacular holiday season. And next year, better than a D.

Okay. That's the goal. That's the goal. We're just matter, matter. Shows improvement. Yeah. C minus next year. I mean, my kids have a lot of Ds, so D isn't bad in my mind. It's still passing. That's all you need. All right, Jen. Thank you. I know. I just learned that. You know that that is still a passing grade. I always thought it was a C. I really hope their grandparents don't listen to this. Listen, everybody's just out here doing their best, Jen. That's all. It's the holidays.

All right. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Thanks. And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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