Smart home heavyweights team up in standards effort
Three leading providers of smart home technology want to provide a seamless, consistent user experience.
Amazon, Apple, and Google are collaborating with the Zigbee Alliance, a non-profit body promoting open Internet of Things (IoT) standards, to create a new smart home products working group. The group plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to securely increase compatibility among smart home products.
This effort, known as the Connected Home over IP project, seeks to simplify smart home solutions development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers so that smart home devices are secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services.
As a result, the project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant, and others. The planned protocol will complement existing technologies.
The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The group expects leveraging these existing popular technologies will accelerate the development of the protocol and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as Ikea, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian will also join the working group and contribute to the project. Project Connected Home over IP is also inviting device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers from across the smart home industry to participate in and contribute to the standard.
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