Getting all of your devices to talk to each other doesn't have to be hard.

On paper, the easiest way to build a smart home is to pick a single brand with a broad range of accessories, and stick with it. That greatly simplifies setup and control, not to mention potential choice paralysis, given the sheer number of accessories out there. And really, simplicity is the whole point of smart home technology.

In practice, however, an omnibrand approach is usually impossible. Most companies specialize in a single product category, or a handful of them at most. The company that manufactures a smart lamp probably isn't going to produce robot vacuums too. In any event, sticking to a single brand means you're out of luck if a competing product delivers better features or pricing.

The smart home industry has been aware of these concerns for a long time, which is why there are now quite a variety of hardware and software platforms intended to make multi-brand systems work, from Amazon Alexa through to Zigbee. Here's what you need to consider when setting up your own.

The easiest solution to this is choosing one of three major smart home platforms: Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Home (and therefore HomeKit). They're designed with multi-brand pairing in mind, so all you have to do, typically, is make sure the appropriate "Works With" label is on the box, and follow platform-specific pairing instructions. We say "typically" only because there might be unrelated requirements, such as support for a specific wireless standard.

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