CSA releases Matter 1.3 with support for more types of smart home devices – Image and sound – News

The Connectivity Standards Alliance has released version 1.3 of Matter. This version of the universal smart home standard adds support for new types of smart home equipment, including water and energy management, EV chargers and kitchen appliances.

Matter 1.3 adds support for several new types of smart devices, including new types of home appliances. This includes microwaves, ovens, tumble dryers, smart hobs and smart extractor hoods. Such devices that support Matter can control it via various smart home platforms.

This also applies to energy management devices. Devices can now display certain energy values, such as voltage, current, energy use and more. The smart home standard now also supports chargers for electric cars. Users can turn such chargers on and off via the stand, adjust the charging speed and more. Matter also receives support for IoT equipment for water management, such as freeze detectors, rain sensors and controllable water taps.

Furthermore, Matter 1.3 gets new general features, such as better support for media players and smart TVs. The standard now also supports scenes, which allow users to save and easily activate presets for their smart home equipment. For example, users can save a scene that instantly sets the ceiling lights to 70 percent brightness and turns off the floor lights.

The CSA reports that the Matter 1.3 specification and SDK are now available to device manufacturers. They can now integrate this version into their products. It is the second major Matter update since the release of the smart home standard in 2022. Version 1.2 already added support for many types of home appliances. Version 1.1 was also released for this, although it was a relatively minor update.

Matter is a universal smart home standard put together by many major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple and Google. The standard should ensure that smart home products can work together more easily, regardless of the manufacturer. Tweakers wrote a background article about the Matter standard earlier this year.