Author: websoft9

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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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 2024.4! 🌱 🌻

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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Art by Clelia Rella

During our State of the Open Home livestream, we presented the future of the open home with the announcement of our first roadmap.

Over the past few years, we have begun the practice of giving a theme for the direction we wanted to take the Home Assistant project towards each year. Last year, we had the successful Year of the Voice, in which we built our voice assistant architecture from the ground up. And before that, we had “Streamlining Experiences” where we took our first stab at improving the UX.

Having a good set of goals allows us to focus our community and resources to build new projects rapidly together. With the Year of the Voice, we have attracted new contributors who are experts in wake words and voice technologies, translators of many languages, and hobbyists in building impressive one-of-a-kind voice assistants. We want to continue this success by laying out the strategy and direction for the continuous development of the Home Assistant project, and a product roadmap is a perfect tool for such a purpose.

Our roadmap is an open call for contributions in the product areas we are focusing on. Unlike many public roadmaps of commercial products, this is not a marketing ploy to attract customers to buy into nebulous, unrealized future features. It is a tool for our contributors and us, the project maintainers, to plan ahead for our collective future.

For this blog post, I’d like to detail how we came up with the roadmap, what it entails, and how you can build upon it together.

~ Madelena

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Home Assistant Core 2024.6! 🎉

Welcome to another loaded release of Home Assistant! Packed with many exciting
new features, this month is most definitely one to remember.

Let’s talk about AI. AI might just as well be the talk of the century. These
so-called LLMs most certainly open up a whole new world of possibilities.
When we first introduced the OpenAI and Google AI conversation agents for Assist,
one of the most requested features was the ability to control your home with it.

Now for the big news:

Well, as of today, you can control your home with an AI! 🤖

But there is a lot more to this release. Super simple media player commands,
more data table improvements, tag entities, collapsible blueprint sections,
and so much more!

I’m personally most excited about the new features in the dashboarding area.
Being able to conditionally show sections and cards is definitely a game-changer
for my dashboards.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

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Back in the day, the saying was computers don’t lie. They were deterministic, zeros and ones executing the rules we gave them. With AI, this is the opposite. AI models hallucinate and their output cannot be completely trusted – yet the current hype is to infuse AI into every product imaginable. Home Assistant doesn’t jump on the latest hype, instead we focus on building a lasting and sustainable smart home. We do have thoughts on the subject, so let’s talk about AI in the smart home.

Home Assistant is uniquely positioned to be the smart home platform for AI. As part of our Open Home values, we believe users own their own data (a novel concept, we know) and that they can choose what happens with it. That’s why Home Assistant stores all user data locally, including rich history, and it offers powerful APIs for anyone to build anything on top – no constraints. Empowering our users with real control of their homes is part of our DNA, and helps reduce the impact of false positives caused by hallucinations. All this makes Home Assistant the perfect foundation for anyone looking to build powerful AI-powered solutions for the smart home – something that is not possible with any of the other big platforms.

As we have researched AI (more about that below), we concluded that there are currently no AI-powered solutions yet that are worth it. Would you want a summary of your home at the top of your dashboard if it could be wrong, cost you money, or even harm the planet?

Instead, we are focussing our efforts on allowing anyone to play with AI in Home Assistant by making it easier to integrate it into existing workflows and run the models locally. To experiment with AI today, the latest release of Home Assistant allows you to connect and control devices with OpenAI or Google AI. For the local AI solutions of the future, we are working with NVIDIA, who have made amazing progress already. This will unleash the power of our community, our collective intelligence, to come up with creative use cases.

Read more about our approach, how you can use AI today, and what the future holds. Or jump straight in and add Google AI, OpenAI to your Home Assistant installation (or Ollama for local AI without the ability to control HA yet).

Huge thanks for contributing: @shulyaka, @tronikos, @allenporter, @synesthesiam, @jlpouffier and @balloob.

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Today, exactly five years ago, I, Marcel, started working on Music Assistant . What began as a quick script, to sync my playlists so I could switch between streaming providers, grew into a beast on its own.

Music Assistant is what I’d like to call a “music library manager” – it gives you full control of playing YOUR music on your players. Just like Home Assistant centralizes all your devices and services to work together, Music Assistant does the same with your music sources and smart audio-playing devices.

To just play with Music Assistant without reading what it is (yes, we know you!):

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Hey, this is Bruno. It has been a great few months since I joined Nabu Casa to work full-time on the Home Assistant iOS app, again a big thanks to our Home Assistant Cloud subscribers for making this possible. Today, I would like to recap what has been introduced since the last blog post for version 2024.1 and discuss more about how Assist is being integrated into the Apple ecosystem – along with a number of other improvements to the app.

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Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 is the new name for Home Assistant SkyConnect. Though it’s a new name and look, they have the exact same hardware, capability, and support.

We launched Home Assistant SkyConnect in late 2022, a device designed to be the easiest, most stable way to connect Zigbee and Home Assistant together. It also came with Thread connectivity support, which was (and still is) pretty groundbreaking at its price point. All these years later, it continues to receive strong support and is a community favorite.

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 is the same great product we all know and love. Going forward, whenever we mention updates or features for Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1, this will also apply to Home Assistant SkyConnect-branded devices. Keep reading to learn why we changed the name.

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During our State of the Open Home livestream in April, we presented our roadmaps for Home Assistant, open protocols, and Home Assistant Cloud. If you’re not sure what a roadmap is, or why we aren’t just listing features and dates – please read our intro to Home Assistant Roadmaps.

There has already been a lot of great discussion about these roadmaps in the community, and we would really like to encourage you to give your thoughts in the comments of this blog – as they will inform how the roadmap evolves over time.

You can skip straight to the sections you’re most interested:

• Home Assistant: “A Home-Approved Smart Home”
• Home Assistant Cloud: “Peace of Mind”
• Open standards: “Certified Quality”

~ Madelena & JLo

Big thanks to everyone who had given feedback to us throughout the entire process!

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