Stephen Shankland, CNET:

An industry alliance sponsored by Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech companies will begin certifying smart home devices later this year, a potentially important step toward making the technology easier to develop and use and therefore more widely accepted.

Matter, the name of the alliance, will let smart devices, such as lightbulbs you turn on with Amazon Alexa or a video doorbell you monitor with Google Home, use its logo on their packaging.

And:

Getting all of these devices to get along — especially with Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Assistant competing to be your preferred interface — can be difficult. Matter is designed to unify the network domain, ensuring devices will work with any of those three main voice control systems. It should work even if you use more than one control system.

This has potential to unify the various standards, or at least raise the likelihood that a smart home device you buy will work with multiple standards from multiple manufacturers.

Here’s a link to Matter’s home page.