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

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.

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!):

Art by Clelia Rella

TL;DR: Z-Wave is alive and well, partly due to a strong community that is building new open-source resources. To thrive well into the future, it must take further steps to open its technology.

Last week, Dominic, Uwe, and I (Paulus) attended the Z-Wave Alliance member meeting in Austin, Texas. It was the first meeting since we became a member and we came with a mission: tell Alliance members about the work done by the open-source community for Z-Wave and find new avenues for collaboration.

Three of us attended, each representing different facets of Z-Wave within the Open Home Foundation: Dominic is the founder and maintainer of Z-Wave JS, which powers the Z-Wave integration in Home Assistant. Uwe leads the development of the Home Assistant Z-Wave stick that we’re working on, and I was there to enable collaborations with other Z-Wave members. Big thanks to Home Assistant Cloud subscribers – thanks to you we can do this work full-time at Nabu Casa.

A little background on Z-Wave

To use Z-Wave in Home Assistant, our users buy a Z-Wave certified USB stick and combine it with Z-Wave certified devices. Home Assistant then connects to the stick using Z-Wave JS, developed by Dominic, and we’re off to the races. Z-Wave JS was developed completely outside of the Z-Wave Alliance, and is based on the published version of the Z-Wave specification.

Z-Wave wasn’t always this open - Z-Wave used to be owned by a single company, which was later acquired by Silicon Labs. SiLabs decided it was time for change and turned the Z-Wave Alliance into a Standards Development Organization (SDO) that is controlled by its members and a standard that is open.

As it stands, there are still parts of Z-Wave that are not open yet, including the firmware that is running on Z-Wave sticks. I might have mentioned a couple of times, including in my keynote, that we should open up more. It is a good thing to let everyone help fix bugs, improve code quality, and improve diagnostics.

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

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 2024.4! 🌱 🌻

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

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 2024.3! 🎉

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. 🥰

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 🥳