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.
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:
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:
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 🥳
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. 🥰
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!
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
We recently held our State of the Open Home 2024 live stream, where we revealed how we are thinking even bigger about securing the future of the smart home. During this stream we launched the Open Home Foundation, a new non-profit organization created to fight for the fundamental principles of the smart home — privacy, choice, and sustainability — focused on serving everyone that lives in one. To learn more about the Open Home Foundation read the full announcement.
The stream includes a deep dive into the evolution of Home Assistant and how it has now reached an estimated 1 million installations. There were other substantial updates on voice and hardware, including teasing our upcoming Z-Wave and voice assistant hardware. The first panel discussion featured the founders of Open Home Foundation collaborating projects WLED, Zigbee2MQTT, Rhasspy, and Z-Wave JS. A second panel gave a comprehensive overview of the state of open standards, featuring key open-source developers working on Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, and Bluetooth. The stream caps off with a look into the future of the open home, including the announcement of a roadmap full of exciting new features.
Home Assistant Core 2024.5! 🎉
The last two releases were massive! With our new drag ’n drop dashboards
and the tools to organize your Home Assistant instance,
it is hard to top those releases… 😅
So, this release is just a tiny bit smaller than those two, but still epic! 🤘
My personal favorite is the new features added to the data tables, which many
of you requested since the last update.
But the ability to change the names of the devices shown on the energy dashboard
is a close second!
Oh! We’ve held our State of the Open Home 2024 live stream!
In case you’ve missed it, I would definitely recommend watching it back. There are tons of cool things
and spoilers in there!
But more importantly, it launched the Open Home Foundation,
which now governs our beloved Home Assistant project! ❤️ Read more in the State of the Open Home 2024 blog post.
Anyway, I will not hold you any longer. Enjoy the release!
../Frenck