Hi,
And good morning to everyone! The weather is pretty miserable today here in Ireland and hopefully, it clears later. In the world of smart home, we had a pretty interesting week; here are the details:
Alexa in Cars
For those of you who are Ford car drivers, Alexa is coming your way. This week, the car manufacturer announced an update that will deliver Alexa to over half a million vehicles across the USA. Not only will Alexa get embedded into Ford vehicles but Amazon has committed to a multi-year partnership that will see the voice assistant become more prevalent when driving a Ford vehicle.
Google Matters
One of the big announcements at Google I/O was its commitment to the new Matter Smart Home standard. The matter is a rebrand of the CHIP project, where large smart home suppliers such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and many others commit to a single smart home standard, finally!
The Matter standard is a big deal within the smart home industry, and if implemented correctly could see the mass adoption of smart homes. In this particular announcement, Google will utilize Thread-enabled Nest devices to act as Matter compliant smart home products. But the ‘Matterification’ doesn’t stop there, Google is also extending support for the Matter smart home standard into their Android software. This move will allow consumers to control their Matter-enabled smart home with both the Google Assistant and the Google Home app. So interesting times ahead for the Smart Home. If you’re looking to dig in deeper, here is a related article.
This Weeks Blog Post
Among the most important smart devices, you can get for your smart home is a thermostat. Regardless of the season, a smart thermostat will intelligently heat or cool your home based on your preferences.
There are many companies that manufacture smart thermostats for the smart home industry. Google Nest, Ecobee, Honeywell, Sensibo, among other companies, are responsible for some of the best smart thermostats in use today. 2021 has seen even more developments in smart thermostats to help elevate the level of comfort homeowners get from them. Different homeowners look for different features in smart thermostats.
>> Read the complete article on the blog
This Week’s Words of Wisdom 😊
And Smart Hue Matters
Yep, more Matter news this week; and expect lots more over the coming weeks and indeed months 🙂 So; Signify who owns the Philips Hue range of smart lighting products is also out the gates early on Matter. This again is another big endorsement of this new universal smart home standard and is encouraging. One point of interest from this article was the fact that the new standards update will take place via a firmware download. Not 100% sure if this is true or now, as many Hue bridges were not built with a Thread chip; I stand to be corrected! Check out this article to learn some more.
Camera Glitch
The popular smart camera provider Eufy, apologized for a glitch that allowed strangers to view a camera feed. Pretty concerning, to say the least. According to the statement published on Twitter; the error affected less than a thousand people around the world. Not much more to be said on this one but is a bit of an eye-opener!
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Did I lock the back door?
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– Gerard