Hi everyone, I’m Michele Turner, Senior Director of Product
for Google Smart Home Ecosystem.
Thanks for joining us,
and welcome to our second Smart Home Developer Summit.
Earlier this year at Google I/O, we told you that our goal
is to make Google the best place for smart home developers
to build, innovate, and grow.
Today, I’m excited to show you more about all the ways we’re going to help you do that.
Together, with partners and developers like you,
we’re transforming the smart home industry.
To meet the changing needs of users and developers in this new era,
we’re improving the tools and opportunities that you’ll have
to build your best experiences with Google.
To help you plan your smart home roadmap, we’ll be giving you a look ahead at our own.
In today’s keynotes and in sessions throughout the summit,
you’ll learn how we’re expanding our platform and tools
to make it easier for you to learn and build devices that do more with Google,
our insights on what users and developers expect from the smart home today,
our new Developer Center and new suite of tools to help you
build your devices, applications, and integrations,
how Google is supporting Matter and Thread across our entire ecosystem,
including Nest and Android,
new automation capabilities,
including the ability to build suggested routines for your users.
And, finally, how we’ll help you differentiate with Google,
connect to more users, and help users engage more with your brand and devices.
We’re doing all of this to enable you to build your best experiences with Google,
so that together we can lead a transformation in the smart home,
one that may feel very familiar.
It’s familiar because, in many ways, it’s similar to the transformation
the internet underwent a few decades ago
from an early adopter technology to a must-have for every device,
from one device per house to multiple wirelessly-connected devices per home
shared by the whole family,
from proprietary ecosystems to open standards that accelerate competition and innovation.
In this transition, we went from basic ways of interacting with information
to limitless possibilities, changing forever the way we live and work.
Google helped make all of that possible
by aiding users in discovering and connecting to innovations
built by a huge community of developers, empowering their businesses to grow.
With our own innovations pulling together information
from across the open web to make it more accessible and useful to everyone.
Today, as the smart home undergoes the same type of transformation,
Google is connecting users to your devices and experiences everywhere,
and we’re increasing helpfulness and engagement
in ways that drive new value for you and your users
by using automation, context and intelligence to make your devices even more helpful
and making the smart home so much more than the sum of its parts.
For Google, our journey as an ecosystem started five years ago
with the Google Home speaker and the Google Assistant.
Now that’s grown into a powerful platform with new speakers and displays:
Android, Nest and the Google Home app.
And, of course, an ecosystem of tens of thousands of devices
made by partners and developers like you,
enabling Google users to engage with over 200 million devices on our platform.
The breadth of this ecosystem weaves into the fabric of users’ homes and lives,
making Google Smart Home platform more useful, accessible, and intelligent.
Today, we’re bringing all of this together and announcing a new but familiar name
for our entire smart home platform and developer program
that helps users and developers do more with Google: Google Home.
This doesn’t change Nest branding
or any Google smart home branding you’re familiar with,
but bringing our platform and tools together under the same roof
gives a simpler way to talk about why and how integrating your devices
with Google Home makes them more accessible and helpful across the Google ecosystem.
Starting today, Google Home will represent all of the capabilities
that our ecosystem delivers to meet the needs and expectations of our developers and users.
Users have never been more comfortable bringing home new smart home devices,
but Google and our partners know that users continue to expect more from us.
They want a truly smart home,
one that’s easy to set up and use on day 1 and on day 100,
that delivers whole-home, seamless experiences across to all devices,
and that is helpful, proactive, and context-driven.
To deliver on this, we need to make sure our platform works for you, too.
We’ve listened to smart home partners and developers of all kinds,
and we know the things that you care most about:
building devices and applications quickly and efficiently
so you can focus your resources on innovating and creating differentiated experiences.
We know that being part of an ecosystem should be complementary
to your business, not competitive.
And, of course, you need tools to grow your business
by helping users discover your products and capabilities, and increasing engagement.
To meet all of these goals, we’re developing a robust set of tools and programs
to enable you to build experiences that meet your business and users' needs.
Let’s start with the new Google Home Developer Center.
Launching early next year,
the new Developer Center will have everything needed
to learn and build smart home devices, applications, and automations with Google.
It’s a total redesign of our Developer site and console,
focused on major upgrades to navigation and new self-serve tools
for both developers and their business teams.
The Developer Center will have tools for each step
of development, deployment, and analytics, including building Matter devices,
customizing setup of your devices in Android and the Google Home app,
creating automations and routines, building Android apps with Matter,
testing and certification,
and new tools for analytics and performance monitoring.
Check out Alex Selig’s session, the “Google Home Developer Center Preview,”
coming up later today for more details on the Developer Center,
and visit developers.google.com/home to start learning today.
One of the most important capabilities we bring to our developers
is the ability to quickly build and integrate Matter devices.
As you know, Google and other leading and innovative companies
from across the industry have come together to develop Matter,
the new universal open smart home application protocol
that makes it easy to build, buy, and set up smart home devices
with any Matter ecosystem or app.
We’re adding Matter as a powerful new way
to connect your devices to Google Home and Android apps.
To make sure Google users are ready for your Matter devices,
Google will be updating all capable Nest and Android devices with Matter,
starting when the standard is formally launched.
That means when you build devices with Matter,
they can be easily set up and controlled by millions of users
everywhere that they interact with Google,
including Nest speakers and displays, the Google Assistant,
and of course, Android devices.
To make sure you’re ready to build your best Matter-enabled experiences with Google,
we’re adding support for Matter in Google Home Developer Center,
and announcing tools for Matter development across Google Home and Android,
including two new SDKs.
The first is a Google Home Device SDK, the fastest way to develop Matter devices,
enabling seamless setup, control, and interoperability.
The Matter Specification SDK, to which Google is a major contributor,
ensures that everyone is starting from the same codebase
but building differentiated, quality experiences
goes beyond sharing the same connectivity protocol.
The Google Home Device SDK provides a unified experience
to build Matter devices that work seamlessly with Google,
including configuring your device with the Assistant,
improving quality with logging and Home Graph analytics
in the popular VS Code editor.
This helps you build a more responsive, reliable experience for users.
And to make your development easier, we’re also delivering the Google Home IDE.
Many of you have an existing workflow,
and we want to ensure it’s easy to develop banner devices
and connect them to Google in a familiar way.
So for developers using Visual Studio Code to develop smart home devices,
you can easily leverage our tools in that environment
by installing the new Google Home IDE.
Melissa Ho will be doing a detailed intro to the Google Home IDE in her session
on “Developer Tools for Matter,” check it out.
Mobile devices are, of course, an important smart home tool for users
and are critical to how users set up, manage and control their devices in their home.
To make application experiences more seamless
and help your users experience the magic of your device as quickly as possible,
we’re building Matter directly into Android
and announcing support for Matter through Google Play services.
One key benefit this enables is seamless Matter device setup flows in Android,
letting users connect new Matter devices over Wi-Fi and Thread
as easily as a new pair of headphones.
And you’ll be able to customize setup flow with branding and device descriptions.
With just a few taps, users will be able to link your devices to your app,
the Google Home app and other Matter apps that they’ve installed.
Of course, when users connect your device to Google,
it automatically shows up in the app, on Android controls for smart home devices,
and will be controllable with the Assistant on Android without additional development.
This is great news for you, as we’ve seen a significant lift in usage
from devices that are accessible through the Android controls.
We’re creating new tools to help you build and update your apps with Matter support
using the new Google Home Mobile SDK.
Building a Matter-native app on Android lets users link their smart home devices
to your app during the set of process or later in their journey
with just a few easy taps, no need for account linking.
Learn more on “Mobile Development for Matter” in James Romo’s session later today.
One of the most compelling things about Matter for device makers,
is how quickly it’s being adopted with commitment from major ecosystems,
participation from hundreds of device makers, and dozens who are already building devices.
We’re well underway building Matter integrations
with many of the leaders in the smart home industry
and helping their Matter devices do more with Google,
with many more to follow.
We’d really like to thank the partners working with us in the Matter work group
and our EAP program for their leadership and vision.
It’s making our Developer Program,
and the smart home overall, better for everyone.
And to help everyone build Matter devices, we're working with leading Silicon vendors
to provide Silicon support and development tools,
ready for integration with Google.
All of these Silicon vendors can help you get started with Matter today.
Whether via Matter or existing integration paths,
being able to easily and reliably connect your devices to Google
helps users build their smart homes,
but users expect a smart home to be more than the sum of its parts.
Context-driven intelligence and automation
is the multiplier and core to Google’s unique strengths.
Making homes more proactively helpful
is the North Star of our vision for the smart home.
For developers, automations allow users to do more with your devices.
We want to help you easily combine them with other devices into coordinated routines
and to use context and triggers
to increase their usefulness and engagement with the help of Google's intelligence.
We’ve started that journey with automations that transform devices,
turning light bulbs into wellness tools with gentle sleep-wake,
appliances into energy and money savers with home and away routines,
and smart notifications that proactively notify users when they need to take action.
But you know your devices and how your users engage with them best.
So in our new Developer Center,
we’ll enable you to create your own suggested routines
that users can easily discover directly in the Google Home app.
Your routines can carry your brand, suggest new ways to engage with your devices,
and enhance them by coordinating them with other devices
and context signals in the home.
We’ll have a preview in the “Google Home Developer Center” session
and a workshop early next year to help you get started building suggested routines.
This is just the start of new ways we’re enabling
your devices and brands to do more with Google Home.
We know that, for device makers, compatibility with Google Home
is an important way to engage your users,
but you want to make sure that your brand, products, and innovations
are front and center with your users
to help them get the most from the experiences that you've built.
That’s why all of the new tools that we’re building
help you go beyond just compatibility with Google Home
and empower you to build your best, most engaging experiences with Google.
Customizable setup flow is built into Android and Google Home
that let your users experience the magic of your device
with just a few taps right out of the box.
Native Matter apps on Android your users can discover and connect to
in one streamlined setup flow.
Suggested routines to help your users do more with your devices.
New ways for users to discover and use your devices’ capabilities
within the Google Home app.
The new Google Home Developer Center that brings developer and marketing tools
together in one place to help you and your team
quickly bring all of this to market.
Of course, when you build those great experiences,
you want to tell everyone about them.
For users that haven’t discovered your devices yet,
we’re leveraging the power of Google to help users learn about your devices
and bring them home.
Earlier this year, we launched our new Smart Home Directory on web and mobile.
This new site gives consumers an easy-to-use and understand resource
for discovering smart devices compatible with Google
and the experiences that they can create with them,
whether with a single device
or using multiple devices together with automations and routines.
Since launch, user engagement has been significant,
with existing Google Home users coming to the directory
from the Google Home app
wanting to learn about how to grow their smart home
and new users beginning their smart home journey
in the education section.
Visitors can learn about your smart home products
by use case or category, and then continue that journey
through Google Shopping, where they can read reviews
and ratings and buy your products at their favorite retailers.
We’re continuing to expand the site with more use cases,
addressing the needs of both beginners and more sophisticated users
looking to grow their smart homes and get more out of them.
We’re creating more opportunities for visitors to learn about
and visit the Directory through the Google Home app,
Search, Shopping, and other marketing channels.
We’ll also be making it easier for you to get your devices into the Directory.
We’ll have more to share on this with you soon.
We’re excited to get into more detail on all of these new tools
and answer your questions throughout the rest of the summit.
In the meantime,
nothing changes for our current smart home developer program.
You can and should continue to build with the tools that you’re using today,
and your integrations with the Smart Home API,
Local Home SDK, and Seamless Setup will continue to work long into the future.
Together with you, our developers and partners,
we’ve built a helpful ecosystem over the past five years,
with integrations covering nearly every category and device.
We’re now embarking on a new era at smart home,
built on the open standards that we’re developing together,
the innovation and ingenuity you bring to your devices, applications, and services,
and the breadth and context-driven intelligence of Google.
As always, we really want to hear from you,
so please send us your questions on the live chat during our sessions,
engage with the community using the #GoogleHomeSummit hashtag,
and reach out to our support channels at google/smarthome-support
and check out developers.google.com/home
to learn how you can build, innovate, and grow with Google.
Thank you.