Introducing New Works with Alexa (WWA) Requirements For Zigbee Devices

Ben Grossman Jul 10, 2020
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Smart Home Works with Alexa Testing & Certification
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Beginning in December 2020, Zigbee devices must have implemented with ‘Works With All hubs’ (WWAHu) cluster in order to be certified for and receive the Works with Alexa (WWA) badge. The Works with All Hubs (WWAHu) is a custom Zigbee cluster that standardizes best practices to improve security, reliability, and interoperability for Zigbee devices with Alexa. Since 2018, Amazon has led the All Hubs Initiative within the Zigbee Alliance to make smart home and IoT products easier to develop, deploy, and sell across ecosystems. The All Hubs Initiative brought together leading Zigbee product, hardware and Hub companies to incorporate and standardize best practices into the Zigbee specification. The Alliance incorporates over 150 All Hubs requirements, and Amazon has worked with leading Zigbee stack vendors to implement a custom Works With All Hubs (WWAHu) cluster which allows many of these features to be leveraged by Zigbee devices today.

To support the new standards, starting in December 2020 Zigbee devices will be required to have implemented the WWAHu cluster in order to be eligible for the Works with Alexa badge and certification. These new requirements will help verify the responsiveness, reliability, and functionality of Alexa-connected Zigbee devices, ensuring your customers have the best smart device experiences. You can learn more about the upcoming Works with All Hubs requirements by reading the technical documentation for Smart Home Zigbee Support.

Add 'Works with All Hubs' to Your Zigbee Products

You can either choose to implement this cluster yourself, or you can ask the Zigbee Stack vendor your product uses for their WWAHu cluster implementation. Many Zigbee stack vendors including Silabs, NXP, and Ubisys have implemented the WWAHu cluster and it is available from them upon request for incorporation into Zigbee 3.0 products. Contact your stack vendor for more information and pricing.

Certify Your Zigbee Devices for the Works with Alexa Badge

Once the new requirements go into effect in December 2020, you can submit your smart devices for Works With Alexa (WWA) certification via the WWA Console only after you have finished adding Zigbee with the WWAHu cluster to your devices. To obtain a Works with Alexa badge for your Zigbee devices, we recommend you first verify that your device:

  • Meets the WWA program guidelines: Your product satisfies connectivity, service reliability, and feature standards for quality and integration with Alexa.
  • Has tested Zigbee integration: Your device should be thoroughly tested with an Echo Plus device, verified that Alexa can discover your device, and that you can interact with it by using the standard utterances for your device type. For a complete list of WWA test cases available in the Alexa Certification Console.
  • Has tested Works with All Hubs cluster: WWAHu Testing harness tools will be available for download in the WWA console to ensure you have properly implemented the cluster. You can use the tools to pre-test your device, but passing the test cases in the tool is not a guarantee that your device will pass certification. Test cases may change, and environmental conditions can play a role in certification test results. Note that Works with Alexa honors certification test results for the WWAHu cluster performed by Element Materials Technology.

Get Started with Works with All Hubs for Zigbee

To learn more about Works with All Hubs (WWAHu) requirements and testing, read the technical documentation here.

 

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