GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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This enables voice control and smart home integrations, features that have been missing from the robot since launch. Now you can set up automations such as “Run Matic when everyone leaves home,” “Dock the robot when I arrive home,” or “Stop Matic when the door unlocks.”
The Matic now works with Apple Home, Google Home, and Home Assistant. The pairing code to connect through Matter appears on its screen when initiated in the app. Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The Matter integration isn’t yet certified and doesn’t work with all the platforms, but it’s a good start. However, as it’s still unofficial, there are some rough edges.
The company notes in a Reddit post that while the Google Home and Home Assistant integrations are both “solid experiences,” Apple Home and Siri still “feel clunky.” There’s no Alexa support yet, but Matic says that will come with full certification.
Matic is a US-based robot vacuum manufacturer that was founded by two former Google Nest engineers. Its sole product, the Matic, stands out in the sea of robot vacuums for a few reasons: it rarely gets stuck, it cleans really well, it’s cute, but, annoyingly, it can’t get under your bed. The biggest plus for many people is that Matic can run entirely locally — there’s no internet connection required to clean your floors. All processing and mapping is done on the device.
This is one reason why the company took so long to integrate smart home control. Matter allows for full local control, but isn’t as straightforward to implement as connecting to cloud APIs, as most other integrations require.
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