Seventeen Amazon Echo devices are now compatible with Matter

Seventeen Amazon Echo devices now support Matter’s interoperable smart home standard after Amazon completed the first phase of its promised Matter rollout today, the company announced. These include smart speakers newer than the third-gen Echo Dot and Echo, as well as smart displays ranging from the second-gen Echo Show 8 to the large, wall-mounted Echo Show 15.

However, this rollout is limited only to those with Android phones and smart plugs, smart bulbs, and smart switches. They’re also only able to connect to your home network over Wi-Fi, although both Thread and iOS support should be available next year. Other products, including the full Eero device lineup, will also be compatible with Matter in 2023.

The move comes just a few months after the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) officially launched the Matter smart home standard, which Amazon also developed in collaboration with Google / Nest, Apple, Samsung, and other companies in the smart home space like Signify (Philips Hue).

“We’re bringing Matter support to well over 100 million devices across 30 Echo and Eero devices. This is an effort unprecedented in scale and complexity. It’s a big deal, and we need to make sure it goes smoothly,” Chris DeCenzo, a senior principal engineer at Amazon and the company’s CSA board director, told us last month while explaining the slow rollout.

Matter’s new universal connectivity standard aims to simplify buying, setting up, and using smart home devices in a number of ways. Notably, it acts as a common language, so, for example, Amazon’s smart home devices can work with others from different platforms and ecosystems, like Google’s or Apple’s. Matter also makes the smart home faster as it’s local to your home rather than relying on the cloud, which should make devices respond faster and more reliably.

Since then, other companies have also been rolling out Matter support. Google, for instance, announced just a few days ago that its Nest and Android devices are also now compatible with Matter, though it will add Matter support to its iOS app next year.

Here’s the full list of Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo speakers that now support Matter: Echo Dot (fifth gen), Echo Dot (fifth gen) with Clock, Echo (fourth gen), Echo Dot (third gen, 2018 release), Echo Studio, Echo Show 8 (second gen, 2021 release), Echo Show 10 (third gen), Echo Show 5 (second gen, 2021 release), Echo Dot (third gen) with Clock, Echo Dot (fourth gen) with Clock, Echo Show 5, Echo (v3), Echo Dot (fourth gen), Echo Input, Echo Flex, Echo Plus (v2), Echo Show 8.