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Technology giants haven’t always played nicely with each other when it comes to their hardware, but they showed a sign of harmony on Wednesday.
Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.22% GOOG, -0.18% , Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -0.37% , and Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.24% are planning to work together on developing an industry standard for “smart homes” to better ensure that voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are compatible with the proliferation of connected-home devices.
“While smart home devices are abundant, the lack of an industry-wide connectivity standard leaves people confused and frustrated when trying to understand what devices work with each smart home ecosystem,” two Google Nest executives said in a blog post. “It also places a heavy burden on manufacturers to make sure all devices are compatible with each other.”
The companies are coming together with others in the industry to create the “Connected Home over IP” project which is done in conjunction with the Zigbee Alliance, a group involved with other standards matters.
Amazon discussed the standards initiative in a blog post update on Alexa’s developments over the past year, writing that a group of involved companies “invites everyone in the industry to bring their existing and new ideas to this nascent effort.”
The announcement comes a few weeks before the start of the CES tech conference in Las Vegas which will undoubtedly feature more connected home devices leveraging voice assistants and other technologies from the tech giants. Whereas it was somewhat rare a few years ago to see devices that were compatible with both Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, the industry seems to be moving more toward openness.
