Hey folks , I came across this video today https://youtu.be/06zzl7o_IqQ?si=V1n8YiqIdR1buPX_
And maybe I’m stupid but , I don’t get the point of this video / the add on talked about . You can absolutely add , zigbee matter and other types of devices to HA and just make automations that make them work right? So what’s the point of making your non matter devices "act like matter devices " ?
so you can export ha zigbee etc device(s) to homekit or other.
Haven’t tried it myself, but from what I read here, it’s the least painful way of exposing devices to Alexa too.
You can make your non Matter devices into virtual Matter devices and if you have a Google or Alexa Matter hub in that Matter fabric, then you have actually shared your devices with those ecosystems without the need to open ports in your router/firewall.
That means you can get Google Assistant or Alexa to work in a mor secure way or even make it work if you are behind CGNAT, where opening ports in your router is not possible.
I use it for the reason others have mentioned: simplified integration with Amazon Alexa.
I have dozens of devices (lights, switches, covers, locks, thermostat, etc) that are integrated with Home Assistant. I have a third generation Amazon Echo Dot and it can discover and control Matter devices. I use Matter Hub to make the ‘dozens of devices’ Matter-compatible so they become voice-controllable via the Echo.
If you’re familiar with the Emulated Hue integration, it can make devices in Home Assistant appear to be Philips Hue lights. An Amazon Echo can discover and control Hue lights. The limitation is that the device is understood to be exclusively a light (regardless if the device is actually a switch or lock or etc). The advantage of Matter Hub is that the device’s type is retained (i.e. whatever is supported by Matter, such as light, switch, thermostat, lock, etc).
The traditional way of making Home Assistant’s devices controllable via Alexa requires you to expose your Home Assistant server to the internet to make it accessible to Amazon’s Alexa service (that’s the route it uses to access the devices). You don’t need to do that if you use Emulated Hue or Matter Hub.
FWIW, in the past I used Node-Red’s equivalent of the Emulated Hue integration. I created flows in Node-Red to control the behavior of voice commands for devices that were not actually lights. For example, it would ignore a brightness command (or color command) for a switch. For a thermostat, it interpreted brightness commands as a temperature setting (ignoring any values that were not in range of typical temperature values). However, I have abandoned all of that in favor of using Matter Hub.