Daily Archives: 14/06/2024

Home Assistant Core 2024.2! 🥰

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard about last year’s “The Year of the Voice”.
2023 might be over, but we are definitely not done with voice yet! This release
contains some very cool new features for voice.

Not just that, we’ve also launched a voice assistant contest
that you could join, and I’m happy to inform you that we will have another voice-related
live stream on 21 February 2024, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET: Chapter 6!

But there is more in this release besides voice! There’s drag ’n drop magic for
our automation editor, and you can now update Zigbee devices directly
from Home Assistant. We also have icons in more places 🤩, and quite a lot of
new functionalities for Matter devices.

In general, contributions to our open-source project have been amazing this
month. I’ve never seen so many contributed bug fixes, improvements, and new
features in a single release. Like… 21 new integrations! This is,
without a doubt, the largest release we’ve ever put out.
A big shout-out to everyone who helped! ❤️

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Oh! And don’t forget Valentine’s Day is coming up! 😘

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TL;DR: We have joined the Z-Wave Alliance, thanks to revenue from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers, and will start the certification process for Z-Wave JS.

Z-Wave is a local smart home standard that has been around since 1999. Thanks to operating on sub-Ghz frequencies, it is able to create a reliable mesh network that can span your whole house. Its reliability also made it popular to power brands like Yale locks and Amazon Ring. The Z-Wave standard is developed by a consortium of companies under the Z-Wave Alliance.

With Home Assistant, we have integrated Z-Wave since our early days. We first relied on OpenZWave until we transitioned in 2021 to using Z-Wave JS created by Dominic Griesel. Z-Wave JS is a fully open-source implementation of the Z-Wave protocol. Combined with Home Assistant and a Z-Wave USB stick, it gives our users the best possible Z-Wave experience. Dominic is employed by Nabu Casa and can work full-time on Z-Wave JS thanks to the revenue generated from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers (thank you!).

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Even though our Year of the Voice has ended, that does not mean the development of our voice assistant has stopped! We’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on since Chapter 5 last year during our Chapter 6 livestream on Wednesday, February 21st, at 21:00 CET / 3:00…

TL;DR: We have added on-device wake word detection (microWakeWord)! It’s faster and more scalable than processing the wake word in Home Assistant. We will keep supporting wake word processing in Home Assistant. Also new is more customization for sentence triggers, additional intents for controlling more devices, and better error messages and debugging tools.

Watch the full Voice chapter 6 livestream

2023’s Year of the Voice built a solid foundation for letting users control Home Assistant by speaking in their own language.

We continue with improvements to Assist, including:

• More customization options for sentence triggers
• Better error messages and debugging tools
• Additional intents for controlling valves, vacuums, and media players

Oh, and “one more thing”: on-device, open source wake word detection in ESPHome! 🥳🥳🥳

Check out this video of the new microWakeWord system running on an ESP32-S3-BOX-3 alongside one doing wake word detection inside Home Assistant:

On-device vs. streaming wake word

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Who is Grace? Grace Hopper was a computer scientist, mathematician, and US Navy admiral who had made significant contributions to the field of computer programming and technology, from her pioneering work on and contributions to the Harvard Mark I computer, COBOL, and UNIVAC I. Why is she important to us?…

TL;DR: Home Assistant OS 12 adds support for Raspberry Pi 5 and ODROID-M1S boards, with the Linux kernel updated to 6.6. Additionally, backups have become faster, and add-ons can now signal when they should not be auto-updated. Raspberry Pi 5 With the release of Home Assistant OS 12, we officially…

Wow! At long last!! The stars have aligned, and our experimental drag-and-drop feature for dashboards is finally here! 🥲

Home Assistant strives to be the best smart home platform, and a smart home allows its residents to automate, control, observe, and anticipate the comfort, security, and various conveniences of their home. Besides voice assistants, dashboards are also a great way to help users do just that!

Therefore, we have been working hard to make customization and organization of dashboards as easy and intuitive as possible, and to create a default dashboard that will be more useful, user-friendly, and relevant right out of the box. Matthias and I teamed up in April last year to tackle this problem together, and we called this series of improvements over our current dashboard “Project Grace”, named after the influential and brilliant late Admiral Grace Hopper.

After months of user research and ideation to ensure that our design is “home-approved” – to be easy and intuitive to use for you, your family, your guests, your roommates, and more – we are happy to share the first fruit of our success in the upcoming release 2024.3, with the help of Paul and of course the wonderful frontend team. We hope that these features will help you take the dream dashboard for you and your home from idea to reality much faster and much more easily.

For those of you who are curious about the features and the design thinking behind them, read on and check out our special livestream last week. You can also try out our updated demo and get involved by joining the Home Assistant User Testing Group! And last of all, thank you for supporting our efforts by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud!

Enjoy!

~ Madelena 🥳

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Home Assistant Core 2024.3! 🎉

Yes, you read the title right! I’m super stoked about this one. It has been
talked about for ages… I promise it is real:

Drag ’n drop for dashboards is finally here! 🎉

A first experimental version of the section dashboard that supports drag ’n drop.
A tremendous step forward and an even bigger milestone for Home Assistant!

But don’t be blinded by these Dungeons ’n Dragons; there is a lot more!

New intents for Assist (I can finally tell my vacuum to start cleaning!), using
script inputs/fields from the dashboard, and a new energy graph for individual
devices. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: A big thanks and shoutout to @bramkragten & @balloob for organizing
and running the beta and everyone who helped out making these release notes
happen during my absence this beta. 🥰

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2023 was the Year of the Voice. It was a yearly goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. We organized a contest to celebrate what our voice assistants could enable with the community. The contest entries have been all amazing, the work produced outstanding. Personally, I learnt so much just reviewing all the entries, I learnt that our community is so creative and relentless. My personal project list grew quite a lot as I want to implement half of the entries at home! Today is the day we announce the winners!

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Home Assistant Core 2024.4! 🌱 🌻

Are you ready for another massive release? This release addresses the most
requested feature in Home Assistant history: grouping automations! 🎉

But why stop there?

This release brings excellent new features to our user interface that house not
one, not two, but three! new ways to organize your Home Assistant setup!
The best part is that it is not just for automations, but for everything! 🤯

Perfect timing: spring is here! Time to spring clean your Home Assistant
setup by adding some organization to your configuration! 🧹

Enjoy the release! 🌞

../Frenck

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