Home Assistant

2023.2: How can I Assist?

Franck Nijhof Comments

Home Assistant Core 2023.2! 🎉

This release covers the first month of development of 2023, and it is setting one heck of a high bar for the rest of the year! 😅

Undoubtedly, the most spectacular features are related to the first chapter of Year of the Voice. 🎙️ It is hard to sum up all of this in this release blog, so I’m not even going to try doing it in this introduction, but holy mother of smart homes: this is exciting stuff! 😮

My personal favorite this release: huge steps into an even tighter integration with our amazing sister project: ESPHome. Creating and maintaining your own secure DIY IoT devices just became a lot easier.

And since we are talking about awesomeness, have you noticed the large amount of logos in the release image above? So many new integrations! 🤩

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: Just a reminder that valentine’s day is coming up. Be sure to share the love! ❤️

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 1 February 2023, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!

Meet: Assist!

It’s Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice, and it’s our goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Together with the Home Assistant community, we have been hard at work building the foundation for this.

Today we like you to meet:

Screenshot showing the new assist feature being used to turn on lights

Assist icon Assist allows you to use natural language to control Home Assistant. It is powered by Hassil and the sentences (contributed by 112! people) from the Home Assistant Intents project.

We believe technology is meant to be played with, and projects should be usable as soon as possible. Together with the community, we can then iterate and refine. That’s why today, we’re delivering a basic experience supporting a stunning 22! languages that work with Assist.

Go ahead, it is enabled by default; just tap the new Assist icon Assist icon at the top right of your dashboard to start using it.

Oh, and we are also releasing some fun stuff we’ve cooked up along the way! Read more about Assist and other released voice features in the Chapter 1: Assist blogpost and a video presentation (including live demos) on YouTube.

Streaming history

History cards now update live! We now stream the state changes while they are happening and update the graphs in real-time 😲

Screenshot showing a history card presenting the power usage of a kitchen coffeemaker, updating live while brewing coffee These history cards now show live power usage, while I'm brewing a cup of coffee.

But this isn’t just limited to history cards, your history dashboard is now live too!

As a result of this all, we can now write less frequently to the database in our recorder. It took years of changes to get us to this point (thanks @bdraco 🙏). It greatly reduces resource usage and increases storage lifetimes significantly. The previously introduced live logbook and now the live history were the last pieces that made this possible.

As a side-effect, it should also resolve the authentication errors some people experienced re-opening the iOS companion app when using history cards.

Grouping sensors

The group helper now supports sensors too! Sensor groups can combine entities with a numeric state, like sensors, number, and number helpers entities.

Screenshot showing the process of adding a new sensor group

This feature is a revised, improved, and more logical version of the “Min/Max” integration / “Combine the state of several sensors” helper. It is likely we are going to replace those with this new sensor group in the future.

Compared to those previously mentioned methods, the sensor groups have the additional options to hide their member entities and the option to ignore sensors that currently are not in a numeric state (i.e., currently “unavailable” or “unknown”).

Now even tighter integrated with ESPHome

ESPHome already works really well with Home Assistant. Yet, this release makes it even better!

If you are using the ESPHome add-on, we have some great improvements for you. The add-on and Home Assistant will now communicate with each other, bringing in many new features.

When you set up a new device in ESPHome and next add it to Home Assistant, they will be able to exchange encryption keys. Removing the need for you to find, copy & paste those. Just a single click and the setup is done! 🚀

But that is not all. What is really mind-blowing, is that the ESPHome integration will now provide update entities when using the add-on!

Screenshots, left one showing pending updates for ESPHome devices. Right one: an ESPHome device installing an update straight from Home Assistant

Right now, the update entities will only indicate if a device needs updating. However, when the next major release of ESPHome (2023.2) becomes available, it will support updating them too! Yes, at that point, you can update your ESPHome devices directly from Home Assistant and even automate it!

Also, ESPHome is deprecating the old password-based authentication for its API in favor of the more secure encryption key. If one of your ESPHome devices is still using a plain password, Home Assistant will notify you by creating an issue in your Repairs dashboard.

Screenshot showing a raised repair issue for an ESPHome device still using the deprecated API password instead of an API encryption key

We’ve also prepared for the next release of ESPHome (2023.2), in which you can add a friendly, more human name to your ESPHome devices. Home Assistant will pick those up, making your ESPHome devices look better out-of-the-box!

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • You can now add aliases to your areas too! Our new Assist feature leverages this.
  • Got an energy sensor in Wh, but you’d like it to be kWh? You can now change the units of energy sensors in the entity settings.
  • Each entity in the frontend has its own color, which is based on the current entity state. We now have officially added support for themes to customize these.
  • The most awesome integration of all, got even better. @Lash-L added support for the battery state of your Oral-B toothbrush!
  • The automations & scripts UI now support selecting other entities for above/below in the numeric state conditions & triggers. Thanks, @karwosts!
  • The Reolink integration now supports FLV streams, cameras can be discovered on the network, but more importantly: binary sensors! For things like motion, person, vehicle detection, and… Doorbell presses! Thanks, @starkillerOG!
  • There is now a service that allows for the creation of calendar events. So, you can now automate events to be added to your calendars! Amazing, @allenporter!
  • When selecting multiple entities from a list in the UI, it will now exclude already added entities. No more accidentally added duplicates! Thanks, @piitaya!
  • @Kane610 added PoE power sensors to the UniFi Network integrations, nice!
  • The Tile card now has a vertical option! Great, @TheZoker!
  • Jellyfin now works with TV shows in the media browser. Thanks, @j-stienstra!
  • We have bumped the CHIP/Matter SDK version used by our Matter implementation to 1.0.0.2, which contains many fixes.
  • From the Month of “What the heck?”: Old-style groups can now remove entities from the group using the group.set service. Thanks, @gjohansson-ST!
  • You might have noticed a Thread and an Open Thread Border Router integration being added to this release. These are currently not for active use but for initial early development.
  • The experimental multi-pan feature has been enabled again. Allowing to run both Zigbee and Thread using the single radio found in both Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect.
  • The following integrations now reached a Platinum level on the integration quality scale:

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

  • EnergyZero, added by @klaasnicolaas
    Retrieves dynamic (hourly) energy & gas prices from the Dutch utility company EnergyZero.

  • EufyLife, added by @bdr99
    Integrate Eufy smart scales over Bluetooth.

  • Everything but the Kitchen Sink, added by @emontnemery
    This is a test integration, which provides various odd and obscure entities. It can be helpful for development purposes, but generally no use otherwise.

  • Google Mail, added by @tkdrob
    Provides services to manage your Google Mail auto-response and provides a notification service to send (or draft) emails.

  • LD2410 BLE, added by @930913
    Integrates a $4 LD2410 Bluetooth mmWave sensor, which works with our Bluetooth proxies!

  • Mopeka, added by @bdraco
    Works with your Mopeka BLE propane tank monitors.

  • OpenAI Conversation, added by @balloob
    OpenAI integration that uses GPT-3 to showcase replacing the Home Assistant conversation agent. Note: It cannot control anything in your home.

  • Read Your Meter Pro, added by @OnFreund
    Pull in your water usage/meter readings from your Read Your Meter Pro account.

  • Ruuvi Gateway, added by @akx
    Integrates the Ruuvi Gateway that reads your Ruuvi sensors.

  • SFR Box, added by @epenet
    Offers integration with the SFR broadband routers.

  • Starlink, added by @boswelja
    Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX. Integrate your Starlink dish with Home Assistant.

  • Stookwijzer, added by @fwestenberg
    Stookwijzer advises wether to burn pallets or wood, or to use the barbecue. This can prevent health problems for people in the area (NL only).

  • Zeversolar, added by @kvanzuijlen
    Get power and energy information from your Zeversolar solar inverter locally.

This release also has some new virtual integrations. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. These are new:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2023.2.1 - February 2

Release 2023.2.2 - February 4

Release 2023.2.3 - February 7

Release 2023.2.4 - February 13

Release 2023.2.5 - February 15

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

Farewell to the following

The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:

  • Almond has been removed. It is in a non-working state, and the services have been shut down.
  • OpenALPR Local was previously deprecated and has now been removed. It doesn’t work correctly and has no usage, according to our public analytics.

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2023.2