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Matter is the new name of Project CHIP, the partnership that promises to simplify your smart home

Matter is the new name of Project CHIP, the partnership that promises to simplify your smart home

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Launching before the end of 2021

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The Matter logo

Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) — the ambitious smart home partnership that will see Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, the Zigbee Alliance, and dozens of other companies work together on an open standard — has gotten a new name: Matter.

The rebranding comes ahead of the first Matter certifications, which are set to arrive before the end of 2021. The new branding and logo are designed to help make it easier for customers to tell which devices work with Matter’s unified system, with the logo set to appear on future hardware products.

Image: Connectivity Standards Alliance

The goal of Matter is deceptively simple: make sure you’re able to use your smart home devices with the voice assistant (or assistants) of choice, whether that’s Apple’s Siri / HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, or Google Assistant. At launch, Matter will run on Ethernet Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth Low Energy.

Other big companies, like Philips Hue, are on board: the company has already promised to release a simple software update in the coming months that will make all of its past and present products compatible with Matter once it launches.

It’s an ambitious goal, which could vastly simplify the confusing parts of smart home setup — assuming companies are willing to put in the work to issue software updates and integrate the standard into their current and future products.

As part of the announcement, the Zigbee Alliance (which created the Zigbee standard for interconnected smart home gadgets) has announced that it’ll rename itself to the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) as it expands to focus more on projects like Matter in addition to the existing Zigbee network.