Matter with Chris LaPré: The Tech Between Us, Season 3 Episode 2, Part 1

Transcript:

Raymond Yin:
Growing up, one of my favorite shows was the Jetsons. Now to be clear, while the antics of George, Jane, Judy, and his boy Elroy did make me laugh, it was really the gadgets that got me hooked on the show. Okay. Yeah. I was a nerd from way back. Their lives were filled with technology, but how much did the show get right about future home life? Well, let's see. They had flying cars that turned into suitcases, a maid-shaped robot named Rosie, and more home automation gadgets than we could name. Well, today we don't have Rosie, but we do have a short circular disc named Roomba vacuuming our floors for us. Prototype robots are folding and putting clothes away. 3D printers are making estates, and we can accomplish a lot just by speaking out loud to Siri or Alexa, and the list goes on.

Now, the problem with all this in today's world is that it takes feats of technological gymnastics to get Siri to talk to my Ring Doorbell camera, or to get Alexa to control my Nest thermostat. They simply don't speak the same language, and as much as the hacker in me enjoyed putting the pieces together, this situation may all be coming to an end soon with the release of the Matter specification to talk about this one protocol to unite them all. I have with me today, Chris LaPré, Chief Technical Officer at the Connectivity Standards Alliance.

Hi, Chris. Welcome to the Tech Between Us.

Chris LaPré:
Hi, Raymond. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Raymond Yin:
Chris, to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about the CSA?

Chris LaPré:
We used to be the ZigBee Alliance, for about 20 years, you might be familiar with ZigBee and, all the work that ZigBee has been doing in energy and smart home. In the last three years, we started Matter. So, we renamed ourselves the Connectivity Standards Alliance, basically trying to do everything that the smart home and the IoT world needs and removing any roadblocks that might be stopping that from the growth that it could be having.

 The ZigBee Alliance doing ZigBee and then also something else didn’t necessarily make sense. We wanted to make sure we had a slightly more generic name that specified what we were doing in the IoT space broadly. And ZigBee is one of our technologies.

Raymond Yin:
How exactly did you get you companies like Apple and Google and Amazon and Samsung? Not to mention almost 300 other companies to all agree on something. That just seems like an amazing feat.

Chris LaPré:
I certainly want to give a lot of credit to our CEO, Tobin Richardson, on this front. He’s definitely been talking to all the right people for many, many years now. I think a lot of people around the Alliance were envisioning this as a necessary step for the smart home - talking about a data model like ours being put on top of IP. I also want to make sure that everyone's aware that I think Google, Apple, Amazon, and all the other major players saw this themselves. A good story to go back to is we have these industry events, which we call hives, and we have one or two a year. During Covid, we didn't have any, but we tried to bring industry players to the table and solve problems.

About five or six years ago, one of the sessions was looking into what is holding back the IoT. There were lots of predictions that by 2020 there would be 1.2 trillion devices in the field, and we were nowhere near on target for that. So what was holding that back? And one of the major problems that was holding it back was the ecosystems themselves. Everybody saw that as the problem. So, it just seemed like a natural fit to start to try to solve that problem in a central place where we can all solve the problem together and then move forward to make that IoT Smart home market as big and as good as it could be.

Raymond Yin
So, this was just kind of an ad hoc session at the time?

Chris LaPré:
No. So the Hive is not part of the Alliance itself. The Alliance runs it. We invite members and non-members and also other industry stakeholders. At these events, we discuss problems and how we could solve it. We try to make sure that major players are there that that can bring in engineering resources to start solving that problem. But it still took a number of years for all the different pieces to fall into place. That led to the announcement that we made in December of 2019, where we were going to be working on what we then called Connected Home over IP.

Raymond Yin:
I do remember the CHIP initiatives.

Chris LaPré:
That was basically the beginning announcement. Amazon was already a board member. Samsung Smart Things was already a board member. That announcement put it all together with Google and Apple joining as part of the board. Announcing that project, the project name, the process through which we would choose the name Matter and then go through to develop Matter as well.

Raymond Yin:
And, here we are today with a completed standard and a bunch of product rolling out.

Chris LaPré:
We announced the 1.0 version of the standard was finalized in. So from December of 2019 through October of 2022 was the timeline from beginning to 1.0.

Raymond Yin:
Specific to the standard, the average consumer, and I'm going to use my 89-year-old mother, just because she is, to me, the typical consumer. What does Matter mean to that consumer in terms of usability?

Chris LaPré:
What you see in the market or before Matter is that all the different ecosystems, define their own way of working. The protocols are not interoperable. So, at first you need to decide is this going to work in my home or not? And then once you do decide, you then need to figure out the onboarding process. What do I have to do to get that thing either a sensor or a door lock or a smart plug to be on my network? And all of them have different paradigms for that as well. So the first thing that Matter does in terms of simplicity and interoperability is to solve that problem. It's a single logo. All the major ecosystems are proposing to support it in the future.

And so, your mother can see that logo and say, this is going to work in my home because that logo is on my devices. And then also there will be either a barcode on it or Bluetooth pairing where it will just work. So all she has to know are those two methods, and then that device that she buys will be on her network and will start to work. That's the biggest thing, I think, for people who haven't wanted to jump into the smart home at all, is the complexity of it. They hear horror stories of their friends who are geeks diving into it and setting up these big networks and always have this problem. This device not talking to that device or oh, I have to use that gateway to talk to this device and bring it around to that device. I always call it scaffolding. I set up the scaffolding to use that one extra spot in my house, but this takes away all the scaffolding as well. So, it's simplicity and confidence.

Raymond Yin:
I am one of those that takes a little bit - a piece here, a piece there, and tries to put a little glue on it and, and hopefully it stays up and running.

Chris LaPré:
Then one little thing changes in a driver somewhere, and then your whole system stops working, or at least that one device stops working and then rules start to fail. This breaks down that complexity and really simplifies things for users that just aren't interested in that complexity.

Raymond Yin:
And for people who just really want to take it out of the box, turn it on. It finds everything, and their doorbell is now talking to Siri that's talking to their thermostat and it just magically all works.

Chris LaPré:
Exactly.

Raymond Yin:
Really will it be that simple?  You mentioned barcodes scanning. You literally just take a phone, scan it? You don't have to enter any passwords, SSIDs, IP addresses or anything like that?

Chris LaPré:
Well, the pairing app has to know your SSID for your password. And depending on it, it might already know that or you might need to tell it once. But then once you've given it that information, all the Thread credentials are all formed behind the scenes. So that all happens automatically. And if you're then adding another ecosystem, you might need to inform that ecosystem of your SSID password, but it's one time per ecosystem, usually per house.

Raymond Yin:
Okay, so it really will simplify the overall buying process for smart home and even IoT devices in the consumer space.

Chris LaPré:
Correct. And there are some optional features in some devices but that's not too many today. I always joke about the Matter fireplace. We don't have a Matter fireplace yet, but should we build a Matter fireplace that might have some complexity, so I can just scan the barcode, and then my app can turn it on and off. But let's say I could do sine waves or something in the fireplace itself. I might need to download a special app to do the proprietary things the fireplace can support. But that would be a secondary app that's optional and Matter supports that optionality. So that more complicated feature could be added for differentiation purposes.

Raymond Yin:
I would have never thought to do a sine wave in a fireplace. But actually, now that you've mentioned it, that sounds really cool.

Chris LaPré:
Yeah, I've actually got lots of jokes about the Matter fireplace, but maybe we'll talk about that another time.

Raymond Yin:
What should people, primarily consumers, what should they not expect from Matter?

Chris LaPré:
It's not set out to do, and not even trying to do, is to integrate all the ecosystems. We do actually have a project that is looking into how we can integrate ecosystems. But if you have one smart speaker that has a login and does all of its ecosystem things and another smart speaker that does all its ecosystem things, those are two separate pieces there. This is not any way for those ecosystems to communicate to each other. But I can take my Matter device and pair it to both of them. So that's a big step forward. Now, I can have a light bulb that talks to one smart speaker, and that light bulb can also talk to another smart speaker, but it isn't going to magically make all of your smart speakers, if they're different manufacturers, start to talk to each other tomorrow.

Raymond Yin:
You're really not trying to re-architect Home Kit or Alexa or anything like that. You're just simply bringing them all together in this harmonious environment.

Chris LaPré:
Right. Both of those ecosystems, in particular, have signed up to be supporting Matter and are rolling Matter out. As Matter devices come into the field, you can buy a Matter device. And whether I have one or the other of those, it will work with both those ecosystems.

Raymond Yin:
What devices can a consumer go out and get today and put on Matter and be able to control with any of the smart speakers?

Chris LaPré:
Great question. Let me answer it in two phases. The Matter protocol supports all of the major devices in homes except cameras today. So that includes light bulbs and smart plugs, switches. So, all the lighting components, door locks, thermostats, window coverings, garage door openers and TVs. So we've added TVs as sort of a new smart home device type. All of those are supported by Matter and all of those have certified device types. A number of these certified device types are available for purchase today.

Raymond Yin:
And the consumer, all they have to do is look for the Matter logo on whatever packaging they're picking up. And if it's there it'll be supported in those device types.

Chris LaPré:
Correct.

Raymond Yin:
It sounds like you guys are constantly adding device types and even probably extending the current ones that you support today.

Chris LaPré:
Correct. We've announced that we support two new releases per year, a spring one that's coming in about a month's time. And the fall release that will come towards the end of the year.

Raymond Yin:
What are some of these new device types?

Chris LaPré:
The ones that are furthest along are robot vacuum support, white goods appliances so refrigerators, washers, dryers and dishwashers. That's mostly in a notification sense, your washer cycle is done. Or maybe to delay the start of a particular device. Those are furthest along. Cameras are getting a lot of activity. There’s a chance maybe it might be ready for the fall. It is obviously the big one that's sort of missing from our initial protocol, and that is because it is more complex. Cameras are sending streams and lots of different types of data and those streams have to be synchronized. So, a lot more complex of a device type that is taking a little bit longer. Another is what we're calling access points. Imagine your Wi-Fi access point that Verizon or someone might be putting in your home.

What does that box have to do to interact with you as a consumer? I think set top boxes, broadly speaking, fit into that, although that might fork off eventually. Because the set top box can obviously interact in a more rich interface Than just an access point sitting in a closet and may have a button, may not have a button. But there are things that an access point needs to do to support Matter better, support IoT better. Right now it's very purpose-built, I would say for Wi-Fi, laptops that have a richer interface, keyboards and other things where I can type in SSIDs. So those are the two big ones from an engineering perspective.

Another broad category I'll mention is energy management. This is one that's gotten a lot of momentum lately as well now that you have a ubiquitous network in your home. How can we use it to save you money in the energy field? The cost of energy is fluctuating a lot. There's a lot of energy waste in homes. There's lots of energy concerns around the world. So how can Matter help you save money? The big piece here is flexible loads. Electric vehicles is one of our projects. So, there will be a Matter electric vehicle charger.

Water heaters is another project that we're working on. Again, a huge flexible load of the ones that we haven't started working on yet. Pool pumps, air conditioners…what can we find in your home that it's running and it's taking a lot of energy now. Maybe we could delay it an hour or two hours or three hours and not cause you problems. The electric vehicle charge is probably the best one. If you're charging your electric vehicle is already at 50-60% and the cost of energy is going up a lot right now, you probably don't want to spend that really high cost of energy just to go from 60 to 70 or 80%. If you can delay that for a couple hours, or maybe not even go above 60%. That's one of those large flexible loads that can be deferred either through signals from your electric company or just in order to save money in terms of the cost of energy. So, that's a whole area that we're really interested in and a lot of activities going into.

Raymond Yin:
Does all that start with a smart meter? In other words, would a consumer have to have a smart meter or that type of device in their house to be able to take advantage of all that?

Chris LaPré:
That's a great question. It’s funny that ZigBee was really popular a couple of years ago because of the smart meter, smart energy. I would say the quick answer is no. All you really need to save money for consumers is the potential cost of energy in the future.
In many parts of the world, it will come from a smart meter. The smart meter will have some type of broadcast method that maybe something in your home could talk Matter. It could be smart energy. It could be ZigBee Smart Energy. It could be any other technology that other countries in the world have adopted. But then that different sort of regionally specific device could be detecting prices and future prices and what the threshold of that is. And getting demand response like I'll pay you a lot of money in the next 30 minutes if you could shed this sort of load, basically give you free energy. Those signals from the electric company could be coming in as well as the price, either through a smart meter or through internet technology, like Open ADR. And remember now that we are IP based, that opens up, lots and lots of options for getting the price across the internet.

Raymond Yin:
Once you have an IP, you can pretty much talk to anything else out there that also has an IP.

Chris LaPré:
Right, give you the address and then your energy provider could be giving you the information based on your address, which isn't private.

Raymond Yin:
I can see that really making a big difference, especially down here in Texas in the middle of summer when you're trying to load balance in the middle of the day versus at night. I can see something like that being really important long term to the national grid.

Chris LaPré:
Yeah. And that's one of those pet projects that I feel really strongly about. If we can really start to save money for consumers, but then also reduce all of our carbon footprints especially because we're going to have other information about the home. We're going to start to detect whether or not you're home at a much better granularity as more and more devices are in the home. And so we don't wanna be sharing that information with the world, but a little device in your home could say, I'm not home and I could tell because I've got 10 motion sensors and none of them are firing, so let's reduce the thermostat. Let's not be air conditioning this empty home. And that's one way to really save a lot of money for consumers, because lots of people just forget to turn the thermostat down when they leave.

Raymond Yin:
Doing it on demand or actually the opposite of on demand when no demand versus requiring somebody to actually program a Nest.

Chris LaPré:
Right, and like I said, we're getting more and more devices. We're hopefully getting more and more devices connected to this network so we can get a better sense of your occupancy, as more and more of these devices start to talk to each other.

Raymond Yin:
Let’s pivot to a set of rapid-fire questions, which come from our sponsored partner, Schneider Electric, pioneer in the integration of Matter-compliant products with home energy management solutions. Explore more from them by visiting mouser.com/schneider-electric.

Raymond Yin:
As the technical advocate of Matter, you've traveled all over the globe. What's been your favorite place to visit?

Chris LaPré:
I just got back from Rio. I didn't spend much time there, but it was a pretty fascinating city. I was there for four days - quick in and quick out for such a long trip - but it was my first time in Brazil. The people were really friendly. It was really great place. I love lots of places around the world, so I'll just throw that one out there as my most recent favorite.

Raymond Yin:
Brazil is actually on my bucket list. I have not yet been there. So, Star Wars or Star Trek?

Chris LaPré:
Rapid Fire and all my answers are more complicated. I've always loved Star Trek, The Next Generation.

Chris LaPré:
My whole family and my friends are going to be disappointed, but, yeah, I’m Star Trek.

Raymond Yin:
I'm right there with you. I've loved the original Trek when it was on. I loved TNG. And pretty much Picard season three is season eight of TNG.

Chris LaPré:
Such smart writing and sometimes Star Wars just got a little off the rail.

Raymond Yin:
I do like Mandalorian, though.

Chris LaPré:
Mandalorian was fantastic.

Raymond Yin:
So, for of all the smart home devices in your house, which ones are you excited to have talk to each other through Matter?

Chris LaPré:
I'm not going to go so much personal on this one, but the thing that I've been hearing a lot about, you don't have to replace any of your devices in your home, but should you want to replace something, particularly if there is scaffolding that's holding something up. A number of people have done a lot to get a Nest thermostat to talk to their Home Kit. So, I've talked to a lot of people who are really excited about getting rid of that scaffolding and being able to have that talk directly. So, I think I have to throw that out there as the one that most people have been talking to me about. Saying, when can I do that? I keep saying soon. Soon!

Raymond Yin:
It's definitely sooner rather than later.

Chris LaPré:
Yes.

Raymond Yin:
You mentioned machine learning and artificial intelligence earlier. Any concerns about the end of the world?

Chris LaPré:
I have a young daughter. I don't talk to her about the end of the world coming anytime soon. But I think there's certainly concerns. In the AI space, we need to be thoughtful moving into that space. Lots of science fiction that I've read, it's all about once a device can start replicating itself. It'll just replicate itself to kill everybody not even necessarily on purpose. And so those are the kinds of things where it's not really AI that's killing us, but some sort of poor decision that was made to let something happen unbounded that then causes some catastrophic problem.
Those are the kinds of things way before we get to some advanced intelligence that's going to be so much smarter than us. We need to be really careful because we can make some really bad decisions that could cause lots and lots of problems. And that's where, I think, we're starting to get on the steps where those bad decisions are happening easier and easier.

Raymond Yin:
I just read GPT four is out, the content algorithm. And GPT five, rumor has it, that GPT five may actually achieve AGI, advanced general intelligence.

Chris LaPré:
I remember seeing the thing about GPT four’s test scores. Did you see where they basically said how it could outperform humans on all these different tests, like the bar exam. Basically, it's already smarter than all of us in terms of what our jobs are.

Raymond Yin:
What me, scared? Never! What gets you up in the morning? I mean, not physically, not in device wise, but what gets you up in the morning?

Chris LaPré:
I wasn't going to make a joke about my alarm clock, but that was good one.

The fact that I now have a platform from this. We are a member-driven organization, and our members are doing all the work here. And so, I hate to take credit for anything that our members are doing. But as a spokesperson for those two major problems, health and wellness and energy management. For the longest time, those have been problems that I've thought about. And it's always been very abstract as to how I can make a difference. How work that I'm doing could make a difference in those two spaces. And now I finally see where the smart home is going. Everyone is leaning into it as much as they possibly can. Getting the technology right at the beginning, which it looks like everyone is doing. We can really take that into these next two spaces, energy management and health and wellness to solve really big problems.
I've talked to some people in the government in the UK and in Germany, and they're both seeing both of those as their major problems - 10, 20 years from now. They have an aging populous that they don't know how to take care of and in some cases, particularly in Germany and east of Germany, they have energy problems that are just growing by the day. So just to be able to start moving that bar in the right direction, that is just really exciting for me. And does get me up in the morning and excited about my day.

Raymond Yin:
Thanks for joining us for part 1 of our conversation with Chris LaPre. Be sure to catch the next episode of our discussion as we dive deeper into Matter. If you’d like to learn more, The Tech Between Us podcast is just one piece of Mouser’s in-depth look at this subject. Explore the entire Empowering Innovation Together content series at mouser.com/empowering-innovation for technical articles, use cases, and more.

Commercial:
As one of the founders of the Matter standard, Schneider Electric is leading the charge integrating Matter-compliant products for energy management solutions, EV charging, and more. To learn more, visit mouser.com/schneider-electric.