How to add Matter devices to Google Home

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Step-by-step guide to syncing Matter tech with your Google Assistant powered smart home

A diverse selection of Matter compatible smart home devices, spanning a spectrum of brands such as Nanoleaf, Eve, TP-Link, Govee, Homey, and Aqara, is now at your fingertips.

We’re expecting a multitude of Matter smart home devices to grace the smart home market in the coming weeks, months and years, particularly as the ever-evolving standard broadens its horizons beyond its inaugural launch device categories (light bulbs and light switches, plugs, door locks, thermostats and HVAC controllers, blinds and shades, smart sensors, bridges, smart TVs and streaming devices.)

Pioneers who’ve taken the Matter leap early have discovered that adding Matter smart home devices into their existing smart home systems hasn’t unfolded with the seamlessness initially extolled.

Despite Matter’s pledge to streamline the landscape of smart homes, its execution has hit a few snags thus far.

Nonetheless, hints of progress are beginning to surface and if you want to integrate Matter devices into your Google Home, either using Thread-based or Wi-Fi based Matter smart home devices, you’ll find that the process is considerably smoother following recent updates.

It’s super simple now to get your Matter devices singing and dancing with your Google Assistant within a matter of minutes.

Here’s how to add Matter smart home tech to your Google Home setup…

What you’ll need

• Your smartphone or tablet with the Google Home app
• A Matter controller such as as a Nest Hub, Google Home or Nest Wifi
• The Matter device you want to add
• The Matter QR code or pin

Matter and Google Home checklist

Matter promised us a much simpler smart home but, for now at least, that’s not really the case. It’s still very much a work in progress.

However, the basic premise of getting Matter devices added to your Google Home is simple. You just need a Matter controller to connect your Matter devices to; and the good news is that you’ve probably already got one of those in your house if you’re reading this guide.

For a Google Home setup to sync and control your Matter devices, that Matter controller needs to be a Google-made one; of which there’s plenty to choose from including the likes of the original Google Home, all generations of the Google Home and Nest Minis, the Nest Audio, first and second gen Nest Hubs, the Nest Hub Max and Nest Wifi routers.

The Nest Hub (2nd gen), Nest Hub Max and Nest Wifi Pro also offer Thread border router capabilities too.

Technically, you can add Matter devices to your Google Home system and control them through Google Assistant that have initially been setup via a different, non-Google, controller (such as an Apple TV 4K) but that’s another how-to guide, for another day.

For now, before we go through the steps below we’ll assume you’ve already got a Google Home device in your house that can work as a Matter controller and you’re already powering your smart home with the Google Assistant, using either the iOS or Android version of the Google Home app – which will be your ‘Matter commissioner’.

The short version

• Open the Google Home app on your smartphone or tablet.
• Power up the Matter device you want to pair.
• Follow the instructions in the app, the device should be detected automatically.

Once you’ve done all this, the Matter device should be synced and you can choose a room where it lives and give it a name.

It’s then ready to be integrated into your Google Home setup, for automations and the like.

If, in the unlikely event you are doing all this without having a Google Home Matter controller in place, you’ll see a message that “a hub is required to control your Matter-enabled device through the Google Home app.”

FAQs

See also…

How to add Matter devices to Alexa

How to add Matter devices to your Apple Home app

How to add Matter devices to SmartThings