It’s been a year since we launched our first roadmap for Home Assistant, which means it’s time to launch this year’s first update! In 2025, we’re building on our direction to make Home Assistant easier to use for everyone in your household, and taking it to the next level by making smart homes more intuitive, proactive, and user-friendly. 🚀

This centers on helping Home Assistant understand devices in their context, and cataloging every device that works with Home Assistant through a new project, Device Database. And we will do this the Home Assistant way — through the power of our community and our collective intelligence. (…but that’s not all! The roadmap also covers many product areas we are aiming to work on from automation to voice to dashboard and more!)

If you’re new to our roadmaps or curious about how they guide the development of Home Assistant, be sure to check out our introduction to Home Assistant roadmaps. As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable, so please give us your thoughts in the comments.

• One year on the road
• The smart home administrator as an inventor
• From shared wisdom to collective intelligence
• Putting Devices in Context
• Introducing the Device Database
• And that’s not all for this year!
• Laying the Groundwork for a Truly Smart Home

One year on the road

Last year, we introduced our very first roadmap—and it wasn’t just plans on paper. It marked a new chapter for Home Assistant: one where we made our direction clear, set ambitious goals, and invited the whole community along for the ride.

In 2024, we focused on building a smart home that has a high Home Approval Factor: helping both the maintainer and residents of the smart home unlock more value from Home Assistant without needing to be an expert. This was done by improving the touchpoints that all members of the household will interact with, such as automations, dashboards, and voice interactions, while maintaining the power and depth of the platform for our power users and admins.

The real challenge lay in building a roadmap from scratch. That meant not only poring through and prioritizing every single feature request, but also increasing transparency and building trust in the roadmap within our organization and our community as a beacon that can help guide the development of the project. Thanks to the feedback, energy, and contributions from our global community, we’ve made huge strides. In the past year, we tackled some of the biggest pain points, such as drag-and-drop dashboard improvements, automation grouping, standard voice assistant hardware, better automated backups, and more.

Now, in 2025, we are ready to lay the groundwork for the next big step forward: Making Home Assistant truly smart through our collective effort and intelligence.

The smart home administrator as an inventor

Home Approval Factor means that a successful smart home isn’t just great for the person who set it up, but for everyone who lives there. Whether it’s your partner, kids, or roommates, we want Home Assistant to feel intuitive and supportive for the whole household.

In some ways, being a smart home administrator is like being an inventor (or, as we would say, a product manager). To be a great inventor, you need to understand your users. What are their needs? What solutions can you invent to solve their problems? How do you know you solved their problems? Can you improve upon the solution?

Home Assistant provides all the building blocks for our administrators to build whatever they want and let their imaginations run wild, and better yet, it’s easier than ever with the improvements we made last year! However, that’s also the curse of a blank slate. Inventing fun and hyper-personalized solutions for niche problems is a major appeal of Home Assistant, but sometimes, maintenance of a smart home can be a chore — not every single problem requires reinventing the wheel.

The reality today is that, according to our community survey, just 46% of partners and only 27% of children of long-time Home Assistant users are directly interacting with Home Assistant. That’s a big gap, and it highlights a broader challenge: Even the most experienced smart home administrators don’t always have the complete picture of their household’s needs. They may not realize what would help until something goes wrong. And it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to be an expert in everything — from automations to dashboards to onboarding new users.

From shared wisdom to collective intelligence

Right now, if a smart home admin wants to improve their setup, they have to go hunting—through our community forums, GitHub repos, Reddit threads, YouTube videos, Discord chats… you name it—trying to find tips and tricks that apply to their specific case. You share incredible wisdom with each other every day, but much of it is scattered, short-lived, or hard to apply without lots of customization.

We believe it’s time for a smarter system.

What if Home Assistant could learn from our community’s best ideas and use that knowledge to proactively suggest improvements? What if it could guide users based on what others have done in similar situations? That’s the vision we’re working toward: using collective intelligence to power a truly smart home.

To get there, Home Assistant needs to understand what’s in the home. Inside each home, there are the people, the spaces, and the devices. This year, we will start with helping Home Assistant understand devices in terms of (1) context: what each device is and how it is used, and (2) information: every device that works with Home Assistant and how it is supported.

Putting Devices in Context

Today, most devices in Home Assistant show up as a bundle of entities: a temperature sensor here, a switch there. This is by design — we want to provide the ultimate flexibility in configuring your system, and will continue to do so. However, it is not without disadvantages.

For example, we don’t always know that those entities together form, say, a fridge, which is essentially a mini house of its own: It may have temperature sensors, a door sensor, a light, and so on, but Home Assistant cannot assume them as any other sensors or lights within a room. Without that context, Home Assistant can’t do much beyond letting users build their own dashboards and automations from scratch.

As you add more devices, entities pile up, and Home Assistant starts to lose the thread of what’s actually in the home. Your smart home should become more powerful as you add more devices, but at the cost of the difficulty of maintaining them also increasing exponentially.

When we put devices in context, everything changes. A fridge becomes more than a list of entities — it becomes an actual device that can have a dedicated dashboard, default automations, and contextual voice commands.

Here’s how context unlocks a more streamlined experience across the platform:

• Voice: Assist can currently source the right sensor if it knows the area of the device. In the future, we can also intelligently exclude irrelevant sensors from a voice query. For example, “What’s the temperature in the kitchen?” shouldn’t return the freezer’s internal temperature.
• Dashboards: Integrations can provide customized cards and dashboards right from the start, providing a much more streamlined experience. For example, we can provide a fridge dashboard. It works with other devices, too. Imagine a car dashboard or a 3D printer dashboard.
• Automations: By understanding what devices a user has and how they are commonly used, we can intelligently suggest automations created by our community. For example, “fridge door left open” or “fridge water leakage” alerts can be provided without building them manually from scratch.

This will be a core architectural change that will be proposed and discussed in the coming months. We’re building on what our contributors already share in integrations: knowledge about how devices are structured and how they should behave. My hope is that this will provide the framework for our contributors to contribute dashboards and automation blueprints to our code in exciting new ways.

Introducing the Device Database

To make all this work, we also need a centralized, structured place to store and share device knowledge. That’s where the Device Database—a brand new project from the Open Home Foundation—comes in.

Think of it as a source of truth created, curated, and validated by the community. A place where we gather everything from metadata (like power usage or infrared codes) to factual information (setup instructions such as how to add or reset a device) to real-world setup insights and community creations (such as automation examples). It will contain information users intentionally submit to the database, nothing will be collected automatically without your explicit consent.

It’s more than just having all device documentation in one place. We want to universalize all our collective experiences about devices in one place, which is more accessible, centralized, and structured than online websites and chat rooms.

With the Device Database, users both old and new can easily make well-informed choices and pick the best Home Assistant-compatible devices for them based on real usage experiences, allowing them to easily make decisions based on open home values — privacy, choice, and sustainability.

The data will be used and cross-referenced in Home Assistant and other Open Home Foundation projects, and acts as the backbone of their integrations. For example, a future infrared integration can hypothetically benefit from having access to readily available infrared codes from the database.

This isn’t something we can build alone. We’re relying on the strength of our global community to turn this vision into reality, and we’re backing it up with our infrastructure, engineering efforts, and partnerships:

• The Open Home Foundation is here to provide the framework to help us collect and collaborate on knowledge easily and safely.
• We’re working with Nabu Casa—our commercial partner—to create the most reliable hardware antennas that support more open protocols, such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and more, to expand the Home Assistant ecosystem.
• The Works with Home Assistant program is being strengthened to make it easier to find trusted, high-quality devices for the platform, as you may have witnessed with the numerous new partners joining in the past few months.

The result? A system where no admin has to figure everything out in isolation on their own. Home Assistant can suggest, guide, adapt, and point users in the right direction, by drawing from the collective intelligence of the community (instead of scraping user data involuntarily like what Big Tech does).

And that’s not all for this year!

While device context and the Device Database are the major themes of this year’s roadmap, it doesn’t mean that we are dropping everything else that does not fit. We’re continuing work on other parts of the product experience:

• A complete revamp of our automation triggers and conditions to make them both easier to use and more powerful.
• A navigation and design system overhaul to improve feature discovery.
• Continued improvements to make dashboards easier to use out of the box, including a new default dashboard and more.
• Enhanced privacy controls for users, guests, and public access (Yes, I am aware of that.)
• Easier setup for Music Assistant.
• Make Assist more conversational, such as the ability to confirm and clarify a query.
• Continued explorations in using LLMs to improve the overall user experience beyond voice.

In the meantime, we are working on making our roadmap more publicly accessible, so that you can discuss and track our progress with us! Stay tuned.

Laying the Groundwork for a Truly Smart Home

This roadmap isn’t about the flashy latest tech fad (what is it now anyway?) or abstract features. It’s about creating the enduring foundation to allow our community to build something greater than all of us together: a smart home platform that learns, grows, and adapts — with full respect for privacy, choice, and sustainability.

The central theme of the roadmap is that making Home Assistant smarter starts with understanding context, such as knowing what devices are and how they’re used, and we will use this collective intelligence to supercharge the main pillars of the user experience — automations, voice, and dashboards.

We’re making maintenance of a smart home easier, by making it less like a mandatory chore while still keeping the fun of tinkering (say, you wanna go wild on YAML), and by creating tools to help admins solve problems they don’t even know they have yet. We believe that, as our advanced users continue to tinker with their systems, their creations and discoveries will also benefit and elevate every user’s smart home.

We can’t wait to work on these initiatives for the rest of this year! Let’s build it together! 🚀👩🏻‍🚀👩🏼‍🚀👨🏼‍🚀

- Madelena, JLo, & Laura

Home Assistant 2025.5! 🎉

It’s time for the May release, and we have a lot to talk about! But before we do, I want to quickly touch on things that happened in the last month that you might have missed…

We recently hosted our State of the Open Home event—a live streamed show where we discussed the current state and future vision of the Open Home Foundation and its projects, including Home Assistant. During this event, we not only revealed our roadmap for the upcoming year but also celebrated a tremendous milestone:

2,000,000 active installations of Home Assistant worldwide! 🎉

Read more about the State of the Open Home in this summarized blog post

A community of 2 million households is something to celebrate! And we are doing that by gathering together in person on Home Assistant Community Day on May 24th 2025; over fifty! meetups are being organized all around the world! Want to learn more? Join a meetup? Or even host one?

Check out the Home Assistant Community Day 2025 blog post for more information!

Ok, the May release, really, I love this one! It is filled to the brim with quality of life improvements that I’m sure you will love. 🥰

The quest for a great backup system is continuing this release, shipping quite the list of improvements, most notably the ability to set a retention policy per backup location! Nabu Casa throws in a whole bunch of new text-to-speech voice variants 🗣️ included in your Home Assistant Cloud subscription, allowing your announcements to sound, for example, sad or happy!

But… there is more! Z-Wave gets Long Range support 📶, you can now copy and paste YAML automation snippets directly in our automation UI, a new tool to monitor the device discovery process in Home Assistant, and–my personal favorite–the improved experience when you pick an entity anywhere in the UI. 🤩

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

• Another iteration of the backup system
  • Per location backup retention policy settings
  • Backup before upgrading the Home Assistant Operating System
  • Set the default backup preference for upgrades
  • Waiting for the backup to finish on restarts
• Lots of new text-to-speech voice variants for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers
• Picking entities
• Z-Wave Long Range support and improved Smart Start
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • Integration quality scale achievements
  • Now available to set up from the UI
  • Farewell to the following
• Other noteworthy changes
• Badges on the dashboard can now be wrapped or scrolled
• Improved UI experience when using templates in automations & scripts
• Pasting automations and scripts YAML directly into the UI
• Discover what Home Assistant is discovering
• Patch releases
  • 2025.5.1 - May 9
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Another iteration of the backup system

In our January release, we did the first overhaul of the backup system. In the February release, we did an iteration based on your feedback. In this release, we dedicated even more time to iterate and improve backups even further.

Let’s dive in!

Per location backup retention policy settings

This release adds a much-requested feature: the ability to set a backup retention policy per location. This is particularly useful if you have multiple backup locations configured in Home Assistant.

It might be that one of your backup locations has more storage space than another, or that you want to keep more backups in one location than another. For example, maybe you have space to store the last 3 backups in your Google Drive, but you want to keep 25 backups on your local NAS server.

Backup before upgrading the Home Assistant Operating System

Updating the Home Assistant Operating System is as easy as clicking a button. And while the upgrade process has a fallback mechanism in case the upgrade process fails, it is always a good idea to have a recent backup in multiple locations before you start the upgrade process.

To help you with that, the update dialog for the Home Assistant Operating System now includes the option to create a backup before starting the upgrade process. Selecting this will create a backup that follows the same settings as your automatic backups (and if you don’t have that configured yet, it will just backup your settings, history, and add-ons), uploading this to all enabled backup locations before starting the upgrade process.

This way, you can be sure that you have a backup of your system before upgrading, even if something goes wrong beyond the safeguards of the operating system upgrade.

Set the default backup preference for upgrades

The above option to backup before upgrade is great, but the feedback on the toggle to create a backup before upgrade is mixed. Some of you prefer to always backup before upgrading, while others rely on their scheduled backups and don’t want to be bothered with the backup process whenever they upgrade a part of Home Assistant.

To please both groups, we have added a new setting to the backup settings page to set the default behavior for the backup before upgrade toggle.

When you set the option to “Backup before upgrade”, the toggle will be enabled by default, otherwise it will default to disabled. There is an additional option to set this behavior for add-ons as well, so you can tweak it to your liking.

Waiting for the backup to finish on restarts

Another small but important improvement is that if you initiate a restart of Home Assistant while a backup is in progress, your system will wait for the backup to finish before restarting.

This prevents the unintended situation where a backup is in progress, and you abort the process by restarting Home Assistant.

Lots of new text-to-speech voice variants for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers

If you are subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud, you not only get backup storage included, but you also get access to the most speedy, super accurate text-to-speech available. If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the perfect time to sign up for the 30-day trial!

This release extends the already staggering number of text-to-speech voices, but also now includes voice variants and styles. This means that you can now choose between different voice styles and tones, such as “friendly”, “angry”, “sad”, “whisper”, etc., allowing you to customize your announcements to fit the mood and context of the situation.

Picking entities

We are working on improving the context of things shown in the UI. This is to ensure you always know which device or entity you are looking at, no matter where you are in the Home Assistant interface.

In the last release, we already had a small noteworthy change regarding this. We added the device and area to the entity information dialogs, so you always know exactly which entity you are viewing.

In this release, we have improved the context provided within the entity pickers in our UI. This is the dropdown you see when you select an entity in, for example, a card, automation, or script. This picker will now show the device and area name as well!

This enhancement gradually eliminates the need for you to manually rename entities or devices to include location information—giving you a much better out-of-the-box experience with less setup work.

Not only has the visual appearance of the picker improved, but the search functionality has been completely overhauled too! 🔎 Finding the exact entity you’re looking for is now significantly easier thanks to a smarter search algorithm and the addition of more contextual information in the matching process.

Tip

You might notice that the entity ID isn’t shown in the picker anymore!

We think we are at a point where you may solely rely on the UI and the entity ID is not needed anymore. However, if you do prefer to see the entity ID in this drop down, you can enable it in your profile settings.

To do so, select your profile picture in the bottom left corner of the Home Assistant UI, and under User settings enable the Display entity IDs in picker option.

Z-Wave Long Range support and improved Smart Start

We are providing quite a few enhancements to the Z-Wave integration and experience in this release. Our commercial partner Nabu Casa is working on a not-so-secret Z-Wave antenna, and we want to ensure that Home Assistant is ready for it by providing the best user experience possible.

This release, we improved the whole experience in setting up new Z-Wave devices, including improved support for setting up new Z-Wave devices by scanning the Smart Start QR code.

Z-Wave Smart Start QR scanning now works natively in our mobile companion apps, removing browser limitations. Added devices are immediately visible in Home Assistant, even if the device is not yet powered on. Once powered on or rebooted, the device will automatically be added to your Z-Wave network.

The most exciting part of this release is the addition of Z-Wave Long Range support. This is a new Z-Wave technology that allows devices to communicate over much longer distances than traditional Z-Wave devices. This is especially useful if you have a specific device that needs to be placed far away, for example, a contact sensor on a gate or mailbox up your driveway.

You can choose if you want to add the Z-Wave device to the existing mesh network or connect it directly using Long Range.

After scanning the QR code of a Long Range capable device, you will get the option to either add it to the existing mesh network or connect it directly using Long Range. Both have pros and cons, mesh networking is recommended for most devices, but if you have a device that needs to be placed far away, Long Range might be the better option.

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• AWS S3, added by @tomasbedrich
  Use an Amazon S3 storage bucket as a backup location for your Home Assistant backups.
• Imeon Inverter, added by @Imeon-Energy
  Integrates your Imeon inverter, allowing you to monitor your home battery and solar usage in the energy dashboard.
• Miele, added by @astrandb
  Monitor and control your Miele home appliances, including washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, and more!
• ntfy, added by @tr4nt0r
  Integrates with ntfy.sh, a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service that allows you to send notifications to your phones or desktops.
• Rehlko, added by @PeteRager
  Monitor the status of your Rehlko (formerly Kohler Energy Management) enabled Kohler generator.

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

• Balay, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Constructa, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Gaggenau, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Google Gemini, provided by Google Generative AI, added by @tronikos
• Maytag, provided by Whirlpool, added by @abmantis
• National Grid US, provided by Opower, added by @tronikos
• Neff, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Pitsos, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Profilo, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Siemens, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Thermador, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• The OpenAI Conversation integration now supports PDFs in the openai_conversion.generate_content action, meaning it can now, for example, summarize PDF reports for you. Great work @Shulyaka!
• @allenporter added a new LLM tool for fetching to-do list items, enabling you to interact with the contents of your to-do lists via voice or chat assistants. Awesome!
• The HomeKit Bridge integration now has support for air purifiers! Thanks @MaartenStaa!
• @frenck extended the YouTube integration, allowing you to monitor your own YouTube channel 📺. Nice!
• The HEOS integration received multiple improvements from @andrewsayre, including the ability to add items to the play queue and remove queued items.
• Thanks to @Danielhiversen, the Mill integration now includes statistics, making it possible to track your heating energy usage over time. Great!
• The Xiaomi BLE integration now supports the Body Composition Scale S400, thanks @zry98!
• SwitchBot now supports Roller Shade and HubMini Matter devices. Nice job @zerzhang!
• @lezmaka worked on the Synology DSM integration, which now includes support for external USB drives, allowing you to monitor external storage. Nice!
• The La Marzocco integration has been extended with additional sensors and statistic entities, providing better insights into your coffee machine’s performance. Great additions @zweckj!

Integration quality scale achievements

One thing we are incredibly proud of in Home Assistant is our integration quality scale. This scale helps us and our contributors to ensure integrations are of high quality, maintainable, and provide the best possible user experience.

This release, we celebrate several integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have improved their quality scale:

• 4 integrations reached platinum 🏆

  • Ohme, thanks to @dan-r
  • Vodafone Station, thanks to @chemelli74
  • ESPHome, thanks to @bdraco
  • Enphase Envoy, thanks to @catsmanac

• 2 integrations reached silver 🥈

  • IMGW-PIB, thanks to @bieniu
  • SMLIGHT, thanks to @tl-sl

• 2 integrations reached bronze 🥉

  • Whirlpool, thanks to @abmantis
  • UptimeRobot, thanks to @chemelli74

This is a huge achievement for these integrations and their maintainers. The effort and dedication required to reach these quality levels is significant, as it involves extensive testing, documentation, error handling, and often complete rewrites of parts of the integration.

A big thank you to all the contributors involved! 👏

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.

The following integration is now available via the Home Assistant UI:

• STIEBEL ELTRON, done by @ThyMYthOS

Farewell to the following

The following integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] are also no longer available as of this release:

• Oncue by Kohler has been removed because the app by Kohler has been discontinued.

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

• Did you know Home Assistant actually has keyboard shortcuts for all kinds of things? No? Well… if you are curious to learn, after upgrading, press ? anywhere in the UI to see a list of all available keyboard shortcuts. Nice addition @jpbede!
• Support for the Matter 1.4 water heater device type has been added. Thanks, @lboue!
• When setting up a new device in Home Assistant, you can now directly name it during the setup process. Nice! Thanks, @bramkragten!
• Media players now have an action to search using the media_player.search_media action. Thanks, @zweckj!
• @piitaya added a device_name template function to get the name of a device in Home Assistant. Cool!
• The floor_id and area_id template methods have been enhanced by @formatBCE to also look for floors or area aliases. Awesome!
• We now have support for trigger-based template entities for switches and lights. Amazing work @Petro31!
• Support for modern YAML-syntax was also added to the cover template entities by @Petro31. Nice!
• @frenck added support for detecting Home Assistant Container installation types not running in host networking mode. This is important for Home Assistant to function properly. It raises a repair issue if it detects this.
• A long-standing issue with iOS and the dropdown items in our user interface has been fixed! No longer will it select the wrong item when you tap on it while the dropdown is open and the keyboard is shown.

Badges on the dashboard can now be wrapped or scrolled

A cool little new feature for dashboards landed this release, which we don’t want to rush past unnoticed. The behavior of the badges in the header of a dashboard view can now be configured to either wrap or scroll.

Wrap was the original and is still the default behavior, but if you have a lot of badges and primarily use a mobile device, scrolling might be a better option for you.

Improved UI experience when using templates in automations & scripts

If you are a power-user, using templates in your automations and script, you are probably familiar with the fact that the UI falls back to using YAML for any action block that contains a template.

@karwosts to the rescue! He has worked on a solution to improve this experience.

So, instead of falling back to pure YAML for the whole block, it now only falls back to a code editor for fields containing an action template. This means the rest of the UI—for all other action fields—remains intact and you can still use the UI to edit the rest.

As you can see in this screenshot below, the brightness is set using a template, which is no problem, as the rest of the action is still editable in the UI.

This is a great improvement for power users, as it allows you to use the UI for most of the automation or script, while still being able to use templates where needed. It also makes it easier to understand the automation or script, as you can see the context of the template in the UI.

Great improvement there @karwosts! 🙌

Pasting automations and scripts YAML directly into the UI

Found this great automation or script example in our documentation or the community forums, but it is shared in YAML format? No problem! You can now paste the YAML directly into the UI.

When you are editing an automation, you can now simply paste the YAML directly into the UI editor and it will be converted to the UI format. This is regardless of whether the pasted example is a full-blown automation or just a single trigger, condition, or action.

An amazing quality of life improvement, contributed by @jpbede! Thank you! 🙌

Discover what Home Assistant is discovering

Home Assistant is constantly scanning your network for new devices and integrations using all sorts of discovery protocols. This greatly improves your experience, as it allows you to easily add new devices to your Home Assistant installation.

However, sometimes, you might want to know what Home Assistant is seeing or wonder why a certain device is not being discovered. To help with that @bdraco added browsing tools for the DHCP, mDNS/ZeroConf, and UPnP/SSDP that allow you to see what Home Assistant is seeing. It is quite technical, but it is a great way to see what is going on in your network.

You can find these new tools in Settings > System > Network. At the bottom of that page, you will find the ability to browse all the things Home Assistant is seeing on your network for each of the discovery protocols.

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.5 in May. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday.

2025.5.1 - May 9

• Fix Z-Wave restore nvm command to wait for driver ready (@MartinHjelmare - #144413)
• fix homekit air purifier temperature sensor to convert unit (@tamwahba - #144435)
• Add LAP-V102S-AUSR to VeSync (@DukeChocula - #144437)
• Bump pylamarzocco to 2.0.1 (@zweckj - #144454)
• Fix Z-Wave reset accumulated values button entity category (@MartinHjelmare - #144459)
• Fix point import error (@fredrike - #144462)
• Ignore Fronius Gen24 firmware 1.35.4-1 SSL verification issue (@farmio - #144463)
• Don’t encrypt or decrypt unknown files in backup archives (@emontnemery - #144495)
• Bump forecast-solar to 4.2.0 (@bdraco - #144502)
• Fix removing of smarthome templates on startup of AVM Fritz!SmartHome integration (@mib1185 - #144506)
• Bump aiodns to 3.4.0 (@bdraco - #144511)
• Fix statistics coordinator subscription for lamarzocco (@zweckj - #144541)
• Update frontend to 20250509.0 (@bramkragten - #144549)
• Reolink clean device registry mac (@starkillerOG - #144554)
• Prevent errors during cleaning of connections/identifiers in device registry (@starkillerOG - #144558)

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 on 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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

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--ha-font-size-2xl
--ha-font-size-3xl
--ha-font-size-4xl
--ha-font-weight-light
--ha-font-weight-normal
--ha-font-weight-medium
--ha-font-weight-bold
--ha-font-weight-body
--ha-font-weight-heading
--ha-font-weight-action
--ha-line-height-condensed
--ha-line-height-normal
--ha-line-height-expanded
--ha-font-smoothing

--paper-font-common-nowrap_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-display1_-_letter-spacing
--paper-font-headline_-_letter-spacing
--paper-font-common-base_-_font-family
--paper-font-common-base_-_-webkit-font-smoothing
--paper-font-common-code_-_font-family
--paper-font-common-code_-_-webkit-font-smoothing
--paper-font-common-nowrap_-_white-space
--paper-font-common-nowrap_-_overflow
--paper-font-title_-_overflow
--paper-font-title_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-title_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-title_-_white-space
--paper-item-body-two-line-min-height
--paper-time-input-justify-content
--paper-item-body-three-line-min-height
--paper-item-icon-width
--paper-card-header-color
--paper-dialog-color
--paper-font-headline_-_white-space
--paper-font-headline_-_overflow
--paper-font-headline_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-subhead_-_white-space
--paper-font-subhead_-_overflow
--paper-font-subhead_-_text-overflow
--paper-item-icon-active-color
--paper-listbox-background-color

--code-font-family → --ha-font-family-code
--paper-font-title_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-headline_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-display1_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-subhead_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-body1_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-display1_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-display1_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-4xl
--paper-font-display1_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-display1_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-condensed
--paper-font-headline_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-headline_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-2xl
--paper-font-headline_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-headline_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-condensed
--paper-font-title_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-title_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-xl
--paper-font-title_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-medium
--paper-font-title_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-normal
--paper-font-subhead_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-subhead_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-l
--paper-font-subhead_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-subhead_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-normal
--paper-font-body1_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-body1_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-m
--paper-font-body1_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-body1_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-normal
--paper-item-icon-color → --state-icon-color

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

• Searching in media players
• Device tracker TrackerEntity location accuracy attribute type change

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 2025.5

We’re thrilled to announce that Eve has joined the Works with Home Assistant program! Eve is at the forefront of the Matter standard and has some great Matter devices focused on local control and privacy in the home. They’re bringing a variety of devices to the program, including a couple of firsts!

Eve of a New Day for the Open Home

Eve, based in Germany and part of ABB, is known for making high-quality smart home devices. They’ve been an early proponent of Matter, as it really aligns with their philosophy of local and private control. In their own words, “No Eve cloud, no registration and no tracking so your data won’t get exposed. Local intelligence and direct communication between Eve devices and smartphones or hubs without cloud dependency.”

Eve has had a wide range of devices Works with Home Assistant certified, all of which connect directly to Home Assistant via Matter. If you’re not aware, Matter is an open smart home standard that allows for local control by directly connecting devices to Home Assistant, keeping your smart home data in your home. In case you missed it, Home Assistant is now Matter Certified!

Built for outdoor weather sensing, Matter, and a cool segmented LCD display---sign me up

Matter can connect to devices over Ethernet and Wi-Fi networks, but it can also use Thread, which every Eve device being certified today uses. Thread devices can be directly connected to Home Assistant using a device like the Connect ZBT-1, or can be connected to Home Assistant via an existing hub (Thread Border Router) you may already have from another smart home ecosystem. Thread was designed around efficiency and is excellent for low-powered or battery-powered devices. Also, if your smart home balloons up to a hundred devices (or more 😅), you won’t overwhelm your Wi-Fi router, as Thread operates independently.

Eve isn’t just a fan of Matter; they’re actively shaping the standard. Their team is deeply involved with the development of Matter and the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), and we were delighted to connect with them at the recent CSA meeting in Chicago. Their commitment runs so deep that Eve licenses its technology to help other manufacturers embrace Matter. In fact, fellow Works with Home Assistant partner Motionblinds uses Eve’s technology, proudly displaying “Powered by Eve” on their certified motors.

Certified Devices

In case you didn’t know, Works with Home Assistant differs from other certification programs as products are rigorously tested in-house to ensure they work seamlessly out of the box with Home Assistant. Any company joining also commits to providing long-term support and firmware updates while being a positive force in the Home Assistant community. Works with Home Assistant is operated by the Open Home Foundation, and the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers funds this work.

Eve has certified the following Matter-over-Thread enabled devices:

• Eve Door & Window
• Eve Energy Outlet
• Eve Energy Outdoor
• Eve Energy
• Eve Light Switch (U.S. & Canada)
• Eve Dimmer Switch
• Eve Motion
• Eve Custom Smart Blinds
• Eve MotionBlinds Upgrade Kit
• Eve Thermo
• Eve Weather

Eve-rything You Need

It is amazing to have Eve in the Works with Home Assistant program, as we’ve been fans of their focus on privacy and local control for years. The list of devices they certified today is really comprehensive, and I dare say you could build a pretty well-rounded smart home just with their devices. There are even a couple of firsts for the program, including their smart radiator valve, outdoor weather sensor, outdoor outlet, and water-resistant motion sensor. Eve is continuously working on transitioning their complete smart home portfolio over to Matter, so if you spot a device that is not Matter-compatible yet - stay tuned.

FAQ on Works with Home Assistant

• If I have a device that is not listed under ‘Works with Home Assistant’ does this mean it’s not supported? No! It just means that it hasn’t yet gone through testing with our team, either because the brand has not submitted it for testing, or because the device does not fit the program’s requirements (ex. it’s not an end-device or requires cloud connectivity). It may not be the same polished experience you would get from certified devices, but if you’ve been using the device for some time without issue, nothing will change. Our community is quite good at listing the devices they have confirmed to work on the integration page, so this is always worth double-checking if you’re unsure. We may test it down the road, but it’s up to the brand to choose what they submit for testing, so tell them what you want.

• Ok, so what’s the point of the Works with program? It highlights the devices we know work well with Home Assistant and the brands that make a long-term commitment to keeping support for these devices going. The certification agreement specifies that the devices must have full functionality within Home Assistant, operate locally without the need for cloud connectivity, and will continue to do so long-term. If you already own one of these devices, congrats! You’re safe in the knowledge that the manufacturers are committed long-term to providing Home Assistant support.

• How were these devices tested? All devices in this list were tested using a standard Home Assistant Green, with the Connect ZBT-1 as the radio for the Thread Border Router, and our certified Matter Integration.  If you have a different hardware configuration that works for you, then great. The above hardware is just what our team uses to ensure consistency across testing.

• Will you be adding more Eve devices to the program? We are always interested in adding more devices. We’re excited to be working closely with the Eve team and look forward to continuing to bring cool new devices to the program. If there are products you’d like to see certified, feel free to let us know!

Our first Home Assistant Community Day will be on May 24th this year 🎉, and with a month to go, here is all the information you need to take part.

The community will be leading meetups across the globe, so find your nearest event and register now! They’re all free and will be full of smart people with smart homes. If you don’t see your city on this list, we’re encouraging the community to host their own meetups, so keep reading to learn more.

Our biggest party yet

I’m sure you’re all wondering, “Missy, what is a Community Day?”. In its simplest form, it’s a single day in which community members around the world set up local meetups with each other. That leaves a lot open, though. Where do you sign up? How do you host your own meetup? How many people should show up? Where’s the best place to hold a meetup? …that’s a lot of questions! 😳 Luckily, I have all the answers 😉.

Locations and registering to attend

To coordinate all these meetups, we are using Luma, a site focused on tech meetups. All the current events can be found below or on our Home Assistant Community Day calendar.

All Community Day events are free, so register before spaces run out! (No worries, there are waitlists!). We also have people who work full-time on Home Assistant attending these events. To find out who you can meet, head over to Luma 😎!

Host your own

Is your city, country, or continent not on the list ⁉️ Time to take matters into your own hands, and create your own meetup.

Example event page for our London meetup 💂‍♂️🇬🇧

Using Luma, create an account, and navigate to our Home Assistant Community Day event page, select Submit Event > Create New Event (the button is above the calendar on the right). Don’t stress if you don’t have a venue yet—you can add it later! So people know you’re part of the worldwide party, we’ve created an invite graphic you can set as the event image. Make sure you follow this checklist when you create your event:

✅ Event Name = “(city name) meetup”
✅ Time zone = your local time
✅ Date = Saturday, May 24
✅ Time = your choosing! (4 hours max)
✅ Add Event Location = your city (or venue once you have one)
✅ Capacity = 50 max (less if the venue is smaller), and toggle the Waitlist on
✅ Hosts = Add me (Missy Quarry - missy.quarry@openhomefoundation.org) as a host of the event so I can make sure it appears in the main event calendar

Click Create Event once you’ve followed that checklist, then come let everyone know in the Home Assistant Community Day meetup thread on Discord or the Social section of the Community forum! 🎉

Capacity: If you’re wondering why we capped the capacity at 50, this is mostly to ensure that hosts don’t feel overwhelmed with finding a venue big enough. Also, that’s the average number of attendees who have registered for the last couple of events. You may have more people who want to attend your event - that’s where the waitlist comes in handy. 👏🏻

Location: This will depend on the host, but we highly encourage hosts to check out local venues like cafes, community spaces, or bars. Please make sure the venue agrees to you hosting the event there and that it’s an accommodating and welcoming place for everyone in our community. Consider accessibility and the facilities required for large groups (access to transport, food, drink, and washrooms)—this is also why we ask that people not host at their homes. Feel free to consider other public spaces, for instance, I pulled some strings at Microsoft for a cool space on campus to host the Redmond meetup. Just remember, the venue fees are up to the host to pay.

What to provide/organize: These are free events, and hosts are not obligated to provide anything but good conversation. Keep it simple—this is just a chance for people to meet and chat.

Keep attendees informed:  You can always talk it out with your registered attendees via Luma—hosts will have the ability to “Send a Blast” out to their attendees. Also, the Community Day thread on Discord will be a great way to hook up with attendees on that platform. We’ll promote these events on the Home Assistant socials, to ensure we reach the whole community.

Clashes:  If two or more events are requested in the same city, we’ll link up hosts so they can organize things together.

Have more questions for me? Send me a message on Discord (@adorablecyborg) or email— I’m absolutely happy to help you out where I can! 😌

See you soon

Our team has been meeting the community all over the world, and y’all never cease to amaze me. People are doing really cool stuff with Home Assistant, and you’ll leave meetups with new automation ideas, cool DIY plans, and maybe even some new friends. Honestly, if you’re like me, every one of my family members are sick of hearing about my smart home, it’s time to meet some people who only want to talk about that! 🤝

If you can’t make it on May 24th, don’t fret—there’ll be a Community Day next year! Although Community Day will be special, you can always get on the Home Assistant community meetup channel in Discord or the Social section of the forum to set up group meetups throughout the year. 😊

I can’t wait to see all the events added and how many people register for these meetups! 🤩 I’ll share more information as the day approaches, including how you can share your meetup photo 📸, which we’ll feature on our channels. See you on the socials!

We’re excited to announce that Reolink is the latest partner to join the Works with Home Assistant program.

Just recently, we had blinds join the program, and now we have Reolink bringing the first certified cameras and doorbells. Reolink has certified a wide range of their devices including battery-powered and wired options, as well as devices with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and Wi-Fi connectivity.

When someone in the Home Assistant community asks for camera recommendations, Reolink often tops the list. This strong reputation is well-earned, as they prioritize local control, don’t require cloud connectivity for their advanced features, and support open protocols whenever possible.

Seeing eye-to-eye

Founded in 2009, Reolink has been building video security solutions for nearly any setup—whether you need a monster 10-camera PoE system or just a few Wi-Fi-connected cameras. They’ve done this while closely aligning with the Open Home values of privacy, choice, and sustainability.

First and foremost, they’ve put in great options for maintaining privacy, specifically prioritizing storing video locally, with cloud storage as an optional extra. Files aren’t locked down—wired cameras support multiple streaming protocols, while battery models can send clips to an FTP server—giving users better choice and control.

While other brands lock features like motion detection behind subscriptions, Reolink devices work fully locally—even without internet access, all advertised features will work now and into the future. With support for streaming protocols and fully local use, these cameras are set to work for years, which is a win for the planet 💚.

It’s amazing that there is a security camera brand that respects the Open Home values while supporting all the latest features—like resolutions greater than 4K, long battery life, PoE, solar power, color night vision, advanced motion and object detection.

Picture perfect integration

Another reason these cameras get recommended so often is the platinum-quality Reolink integration. This ensures user-friendly features like automatic device discovery, smooth setup, firmware updates, and detailed documentation. Critically, platinum integrations include exceptionally efficient and well-written code, improving overall system stability and reliability.

All Works with Home Assistant-certified devices feature top-quality integrations, but what makes this one special is that it was built by the Home Assistant community. Huge thanks to the Reolink team and @StarkillerOG for the effort that brought it to the Platinum level late last year.

Reolink is a big fan of our active and engaged community and joined Works with Home Assistant to continue this close connection to them.

Devices

🤖 Security has never looked so friendly... and private.

In case you didn’t know, Works with Home Assistant differs from other certification programs as products are rigorously tested in-house to ensure they work seamlessly out of the box. Any company joining also commits to providing long-term support and firmware updates while being a positive force in the Home Assistant community. Works with Home Assistant is operated by the Open Home Foundation, and the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers funds this work. Reolink has certified the following devices:

Video Doorbells

• Reolink Video Doorbell (WiFi)
• Reolink Video Doorbell (Battery)

Cameras

• Reolink Argus Track
• Reolink Duo 3 PoE
• Reolink TrackMix PoE
• Reolink RLC-823S2
• Reolink RLC-1224A

Other

• Reolink Home Hub

Closed circuit

In case you haven’t noticed, Works with Home Assistant has already had a big start to the year (Reolink, Apollo Automations, and Motionblinds), and this is thanks to your support. This momentum is only just building, and we have many more announcements coming! In case you missed it, our State of the Open Home last weekend had many other updates on Works with Home Assistant. Check it out here!

The State of the Open Home 2025 has wrapped, and a big thanks to everyone who tuned in to the live stream! If you missed it, please check out the recording, it’s a slick production and definitely the best way to take it all in. For those who would rather read about all the updates and announcements, we’ve also got you covered with this blog.

It was an over 2-hour event, and if you need a shorter summary than this blog, here’s my best attempt 😅:

For all the juicy details, keep reading!

Open Home Foundation year one

(00:10:10)

State of the Open Home is our annual opportunity to share the latest developments, celebrate community achievements, and outline our vision for the future of the Open Home.

It was at last year’s State of the Open Home that we announced the Open Home Foundation. I donated Home Assistant to the Foundation, and others in the community followed suit by contributing vital projects that form the core of the Open Home ecosystem. That’s also where we set out our mission: to fight for privacy (your data is yours), choice (no vendor lock-in), and sustainability (devices built to last).

The Foundation wasn’t just paperwork—it took us from being “just” a bunch of (very big) open-source GitHub projects to being seen as serious industry players. We’re now recognized as a peer, invited to speak at events like the Connections summit at CES, joining the Z-Wave Alliance board, and even being named by Fast Company as a top innovator—all because we respect user data! People always knew that we were building cool things, but now they understand why we were doing it.

Vergecast talking about realizing that Home Assistant is the real deal!

Powering the Open Home

(00:23:13)

There are now 56 people working full-time to support Open Home projects and the community that surrounds them. These are some of the biggest open source projects in the world, including Home Assistant, ESPHome, Z-Wave JS, Zigpy, Open Home Matter Server, our voice technology, apps, and more. Many of the founders of these Open Home projects now work for the Open Home Foundation, turning their part-time passions into full-time careers - our in-house expertise is truly industry-leading. Supporting all this work requires a steady stream of income.

Nabu Casa existed before the Open Home Foundation, and during State of the Open Home 2025, Ben Bangert, Nabu Casa’s co-founder and CTO, explained why and how it was set up,

Nabu Casa builds and maintains the products that make Home Assistant easier to use, like Home Assistant Cloud and hardware. A big chunk of its profit continues to go to projects like Home Assistant, but now it does so via the Open Home Foundation. The Open Home Foundation builds on Nabu Casa’s original intent of removing outside pressures from the projects it funds, allowing them never to be bought or ruined by commercial meddling.

Foundation upgrades

In the year since launching the Foundation, more steps have been taken to protect the Open Home. We chose Switzerland to base the Foundation as it provided the best protection for these projects. We recently transitioned from a Swiss Verein to a more protective Stiftung. We also achieved tax-exempt status, meaning your support can go even further. Where previously, all 56 employees worked for Nabu Casa, now all employees who work directly on Foundation projects work for the Foundation, further enhancing the independence of Foundation projects.

The Open Home Foundation is growing

A big shout-out to Pascal! He was instrumental in starting the Foundation and has spent the last year fine-tuning its operation.

Donations and Partnerships

(00:26:38)

This year, we received several high-profile donations, and at the State of the Open Home, we announced another considerable donation: Espressif has donated $25,000 to the Foundation! Espressif designs many of the chips that power ESPHome. They are supporting Open Home software development to help drive the DIY sensor and controller revolution forward.

More than donations, we have projects that provide amazing in-kind support

Late last year, we received $25,000 from DuckDuckGo for being part of a better Internet ecosystem. These two sizeable donations make a meaningful impact on our work, and we are incredibly grateful for the support of these two organizations that believe in our mission. We also always try to support the projects that we believe are vital to our work and the broader Open Home ecosystem. That is why this year we started recurring donations to Buildroot, Alpine, and aiohttp.

As we said previously, we want sustainable funding, and small intermittent donations don’t allow us to effectively financially plan. Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions remain the best way for individuals to support us financially.

New Open Home Foundation projects

(00:31:34)

The Open Home Foundation owns and governs over 240 open standards, drivers, and libraries that support the realization of the Open Home, and it’s time to add a couple more.

Marcel van der Veldt joined the live stream to announce that he has donated Music Assistant to the Open Home Foundation! Music Assistant has always been deeply entwined with multiple Open Home projects, and we’re excited to see how this extra support will allow more people to take back control of their music, on their players. If you want some interesting insight into Music Assistant, my interview with Marcel during the event is a must-watch.

And there was more! The Home Assistant Community Store (HACS), created by Joakim Sørensen, has also been donated to the Open Home Foundation! HACS is an amazing tool for the community, giving more choice to Home Assistant users and serving as a great starting point for your development journey. These projects are such a fantastic fit for the Foundation—I wouldn’t be surprised if you already thought they were part of it.

Community

(00:49:00)

When asked at a recent event “What is my North Star?”, my answer came quickly, it is the “Community”. Nothing we do would be possible without our contributions, and supporters. Meeting community members during my travels is one of the best parts of this job.

Franck Nijhof, Home Assistant Lead at the Open Home Foundation, took the stage to celebrate the incredible community. He shared some of the biggest community highlights of the year, including becoming the most active open source project on GitHub (21,000+ unique contributors in 2024!) and winning the most welcoming open-source project award. He emphasized that this success belongs to the entire community, which extends far beyond developers, as there are so many ways to contribute including being a translator, designer, tester, forum helper, or content creator.

Our community is doing amazing things with Home Assistant,

Check out how Rúnar Björn Herrera is making his home more accessible and sharing his expertise with the community. (01:03:08)

One big announcement Franck made was that this year we went from 1 million to over 2 million active installations in 2024! The key to harnessing this community power, Franck explained, is actively listening and building with users, not just for them, but with them. Initiatives like the “Month of What The Heck?!” and adapting plans based on feedback (like with backups) demonstrate this commitment to iterating together, even when initial ideas need adjustment.

Looking ahead, the goal is to deepen this collaboration by developing “fully in the open” across all disciplines, fostering a collective intelligence. To further strengthen these connections, Franck announced the first official Home Assistant Community Day on May 24th, 2025 🎉, encouraging users worldwide to organize and attend local meetups.

Research

(01:08:03)

We want the Foundation projects to serve our community, and that’s why we’ve put a bigger focus on research. Annika Schulz is our UX Researcher, and at this year’s State of the Open Home, she gave us a fantastic overview of the privacy-respecting research we’re conducting and the invaluable insights it is bringing.

You love choice! but we're still learning what privacy and sustainability mean to you.

Our 2024 Community Survey was a huge success, with over 8,600 responses! We learned so much about who uses Home Assistant. For instance, a big majority of the people who answered the survey are tech-curious, have been using HA for 3+ years, live in households of 2.8 people on average, and have somewhere between 11-100 devices 😎 (watch the whole segment, there are so many interesting results!). We also delved into their motivations and how deeply our values of Choice and Privacy resonate, even if the practical implementation of privacy remains a challenge for many. Annika’s key message – “User research helps remind us… We are not the users.” – we need to challenge our assumptions and personal biases.

Works with Home Assistant

(01:24:13)

With choice playing such a big part in why our community uses Open Home projects, it’s crucial to ensure users can find great devices that align with our values. Miranda Bishop, our Partnership Manager, joined me to discuss the “Works with Home Assistant” program. Explaining it isn’t about exclusion but about highlighting manufacturers committed to local control. They also sign an agreement to provide long-term support and be a positive force in the community.

We had a couple of our existing partners send us messages about joining the program, and thanks for the warm words. Also teased during the live stream were new partners close to formally joining the program, including Reolink, Eve, and Shelly (but more details on those soon). Miranda stressed that the program isn’t “pay us money and you can have the badge”; it’s about shared ethics of privacy, choice, and sustainability. The goal remains: within 3 years, to offer certified choices for every device type, everywhere, at all budgets. Your feedback helps drive this – keep telling manufacturers you want local control and point them to the Works with Home Assistant program, as we’re here to help.

Shelly with Home Assistant helps automate Las Vegas' Mob Museum, including its moonshine production! (01:54:00)

Voice & AI

(01:36:05)

Mike Hansen, our “Voice Guy,” was the next to take the stage. In case you missed it, this year we launched our first voice hardware device, Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, which pairs incredibly with all the voice software we’ve been developing. To put it mildly, it’s been a pretty big hit! Mike explained how we built it to help push forward open source voice development, and it’s very much succeeding. Before Voice Preview Edition there wasn’t an Icelandic-speaking voice assistant, this is now being developed—all without a single person at the Foundation speaking this language.

@Jlo's AI-powered home in action (01:42:37)

Mike touched on future plans for more conversational interactions and enhanced integration with Music Assistant. He also addressed AI, explaining how we see Home Assistant as the perfect private playground for users to experiment with AI technologies locally, focusing on utility, not monetization, unlike the big players. A landline phone on set even rang during the segment with an AI-powered notification from my own Home Assistant—apologies, it predates silent mode ☎️.

Living Our Values

(01:57:05)

We wrapped up with a discussion focused on our values with Annika Schulz, Franck Nijhof, and Madelena Mak. We touched on user privacy concerns Annika uncovered, the diverse ways Franck sees ‘choice’ manifesting (beyond just protocols, including local APIs), and how sustainability, as Madelena explained, connects to durability, energy management, and the right to repair.

Finally, together with Madelena Mak, we looked back at our 2024 roadmap – I’m proud we delivered on nearly everything we set out to do, including top community requests. This builds trust. We gave a glimpse into our 2025 Roadmap (02:16:51), including a new focus on harnessing our collective intelligence. This will be driven by a new information architecture that gives context to devices via a device database (expect a detailed post on Roadmap 2025 soon!).

Wrapping Up

The live Q&A session at the end was, as always, a highlight, tackling great questions from the audience.

It was an energizing day, reaffirming my belief in our mission and the incredible power of this community. We’re building something unique and important together. Thank you to everyone who watched, participated, and continuously supports the Open Home. Your belief in this project makes it all possible.

And, of course, a huge thank you to all our Home Assistant Cloud subscribers. Your financial support is the bedrock that allows the Open Home Foundation to thrive and continue driving innovation in the private, open smart home.

Home Assistant 2025.4! 🎉

It’s April 2nd, so this is definitely not an April Fool’s joke! 😃

But before diving into this month’s release, I want to quickly highlight something you might have missed—something I’m extremely excited about:

The State of the Open Home 2025!

Yes, you read that right! On Saturday, April 12th, 2025, we’ll be streaming a big live event on YouTube, sharing our vision for the Open Home Foundation, including the future of Home Assistant. Don’t miss it!

Alright, back to the release! As I was saying, it’s April already, and we have another fantastic release lined up for you.

The big news is the introduction of our new experimental Areas dashboard, which might evolve to become the default dashboard in the future. If you’re like me—not really a UI-oriented person—you’re going to love this one! 🤩

My personal absolute favorite feature this month is something I’ve dreamed of ever since we started working on voice assistants: the ability for your assistant to start a conversation proactively! This is a game changer—no other voice assistant on the market can do this! I’m going to have so much fun with this. 😃

If you’re a power user who loves templates, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered too! This release ships with a bunch of new template functions, making your life a lot easier.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

• Dashboards
  • A new experimental Areas dashboard
  • Time for a new card!
• Voice
  • Improved Voice Wizard
  • Continued conversation with LLMs
  • Starting conversations
• Onboarding with a Home Assistant Cloud backup
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • Integration quality scale achievements
• Other noteworthy changes
• Templates
• Device hierarchy for energy management
• Patch releases
  • 2025.4.1 - April 4
  • 2025.4.2 - April 12
  • 2025.4.3 - April 19
  • 2025.4.4 - April 25
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Dashboards

We’re making dashboards smarter—automagically!

Dashboards allow you to monitor and control different aspects of your home. They are one of the main interfaces for interacting with Home Assistant, and a key contributor to what we call the Home Approval Factor—how useful and welcoming your smart home feels to everyone who lives in it.

Over the past year, we have focused on making dashboards easier to create and customize. We introduced the powerful drag-and-drop sections view and plenty of new tile card features.

We’re going a step further by delivering a dashboard that’s immediately relevant, saving you time and effort while still leaving room for personal touches.

A new experimental Areas dashboard

Until now, our default dashboard has served as a simple starting point—a list of entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] grouped by areaAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room. [Learn more] or deviceA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. domainsEach integration in Home Assistant has a unique identifier: The domain. It is often shown as the first part (before the dot) of entity IDs.. While helpful for beginners, it quickly becomes limited as a smart home grows. We’ve learned that while some users enjoy building their own dashboards, many simply want something that works for their household.

The new experimental Areas dashboard automatically generates a ready-to-use dashboard based on the areas you’ve set up in your home. It uses sections and tile cards for a modern, clean, and intuitive look—instantly. No more starting from a blank slate!

Each area now has its own dedicated page, giving you a clear and organized view of the devices in that space. Entities, such as lights, covers, cameras, and more, are automatically grouped by domain so you can easily locate the ones you need.

Want to tweak it? Yes, you can! You can rearrange, show, or hide entities to suit your preferences. At the top of each area page, temperature and humidity badges quickly indicate room comfort levels, which are configurable in the area’s settings.

On top of all that, the Overview page brings it all together, showing all your areas in one place. Each section corresponds to a room in your home, and just like with the area pages, you can rearrange, show, or hide areas here as well, based on your preferences.

If you haven’t organized your devices into areas yet, now’s the perfect time to start—it’s key to unlocking this new dashboard experience. To get started with the Areas dashboard, go to Settings > Dashboards, and select Add Dashboard in the bottom right, next select the Areas (experimental) option from the dialog:

The new experimental Areas dashboard previews what’s to come. We’ve learned from our users that they organize their homes in different ways—by rooms, by function, by device, and more. They often combine all of the above, and therefore, our upcoming default dashboard will accommodate all these methods of organization.

Over time, this foundation will grow into a flexible system that adapts to your priorities, whether that’s keeping an eye on security, managing energy use, going through your family calendar and chores, learning about the weather, or simply watching your pets.

Please note that this is experimental, meaning it is subject to change and may not always work as intended. We would love your feedback if you notice some aspects we can improve. The community’s dashboards, shared over the years, have helped shape this design, and we would love to see how it works with a wide variety of your homes. Even if you already have the perfect dashboard built for your home, try it!

Update: We had a feedback form in the release notes in this spot, but that’s closed now. Thanks for your input!

Time for a new card!

It has been a while since we introduced a new card, but this release, we thought it might be time to add a new one! Thanks to @mrdarrengriffin, Home Assistant now features a Clock card!

Yeah, the card is “just” showing the current time, but it is a really nice addition to our card collection. It might be a great card for dashboards you are showing on things like a wall-mounted tablet!

The Clock card offers several customization options, including the ability to adjust the clock size, timezone, display the seconds alongside the hours and minutes, and the ability to choose between a 12-hour or 24-hour format.

For more details, check out the Clock card documentation.

Voice

The “year of the voice” might be behind us, but we keep improving the voice experience in Home Assistant! This release brings several enhancements to make interacting with your smart home even better.

Improved Voice Wizard

If you set up a Home Assistant voice assistant compatible device, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, you will be guided through setting up your voice assistant, and this experience has been greatly improved in this release.

As our voice experience is offering more choices, including local options like Speech-to-Phrase, we wanted to make sure you are able to make the right choices for your use case.

The wizard will now help you make a more informed decision based on your language, desired functionality, and device capabilities, ensuring you get the best experience with your voice assistant.

Continued conversation with LLMs

Ever tried to have a conversation with your voice assistant that is hooked up to an LLM like ChatGPT? It’s good fun. However, having to say “Ok Nabu”, whenever you answer one of Assist’s questions can really slow things down.

This release introduces the ability to have a continued conversation with LLMs. If the LLM returns with a question, we will detect that and keep the conversation going, without the need for you to say “Ok Nabu” again.

This is a great way to have a more natural conversation with your voice assistants, and it works with all LLMs supported by Home Assistant.

Starting conversations

During Voice chapter 9, we added the ability for Home Assistant to call analog phones to start a conversation. As of this release, this feature is now available for ESPHome-based voice assistants, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition!

This is a fantastic feature, as it allows you to build your own automations that can send out voice prompts from your voice assistant and listen for a response, instead of you having to trigger the conversation by saying the wake word.

Imagine, for example, you have left the garage door open, and a few minutes later, your assistant says:

Hey, I noticed you left the garage door open, do you want me to close it for you?

You simply reply “yes” or “no,” and it handles the rest… 🤯 Or perhaps after a long day at work, you return home, and your assistant greets you warmly:

Welcome home, Frenck! Hope you had a great day. Want to hear the news or maybe enjoy some music?

JLo made a great demo video of this one, involving his oven and the assistant asking if he wants to set a timer:

This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for voice-driven automations. Currently, this capability is only available when using LLM integrations, but we’re exploring more use cases where it would be helpful.

If you listen closely to the demo above, you’ll notice a brief pre-announce sound just before the conversation starts. This little notification prevents your assistant from startling anyone by suddenly speaking out of nowhere and preventing a jump scare! 🫣

You could even use custom sounds based on the scenario—like a doorbell chime for visitors or a train station-style jingle when your morning commute gets delayed, giving you extra time to grab that coffee before heading out. ☕

Onboarding with a Home Assistant Cloud backup

If you are a user of Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa, it means you can safely store a backup of your Home Assistant installation in the cloud as part of your subscription. A really convenient service that ensures you always have a secure and worry-free backup of your Home Assistant installation, no matter what happens.

Now, let’s say something did happen, maybe a hardware failure, or maybe you are migrating to a new Home Assistant Green, as of this release, you can directly restore your backup from the Home Assistant Cloud during the onboarding process of your new Home Assistant installation.

This means you can get up and running with your new Home Assistant installation in no time, with all your settings, automations, and integrations restored from your backup.

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Bosch Alarm, added by @sanjay900
  Control and monitor your Bosch intrusion alarm systems / control panels.
• Remote calendar, added by @Thomas55555
  Add remote calendar URLs as a calendar to Home Assistant.
• Pterodactyl, added by @elmurato
  Control and monitor your Pterodactyl game server management panel.

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

• FrankEver, provided by Shelly, added by @bieniu
• LinkedGo, provided by Shelly, added by @bieniu
• Ogemray, provided by Shelly, added by @bieniu

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• The OpenAI conversation integration has a new action to generate content, thanks to @timlaing, and it can now search the web! Nice @Shulyaka!
• The Google AI conversation integration also gained the ability to search the web, just like the above OpenAI one. Thanks @tronikos!
• @joostlek has absolutely been rocking the SmartThings integration! The list of improvements is extremely long, but it includes support for firmware updates through Home Assistant, support for event entities, PM0.1 sensors, washer rinse cycle settings, TV and media player support, and improved device handling. Awesome work there!
• Not only SmartThings is receiving love, @Diegorro98 has been constantly at work improving and tuning the Home Connect integration. Thank you so much!
• The Roborock integration has been extended to support dryer controls and button entities to start routines. Thanks @Lash-L and @regevbr!
• Reolink cannot be left out of this list. This release adds support for their smart AI sensors, and adds a day/night state sensor. Nice work @starkillerOG!
• @tr4nt0r extended the actions Habitica integration with lots of new and improved actions to manage your habits, rewards, and dailies. Thanks!
• The Microsoft OneDrive integration has a new action that allows you to upload files to OneDrive. Nice @zweckj!
• @andrewsayre extended HEOS with support for browsing media, allowing you to browse things like TuneIn and play them on your HEOS devices.

Integration quality scale achievements

One thing we are incredibly proud of in Home Assistant is our integration quality scale. This scale helps us and our contributors to ensure integrations are of high quality, maintainable, and provide the best possible user experience.

This release, we celebrate several integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have improved their quality scale:

• 4 integrations reached platinum 🏆

  • Azure Storage, thanks to @zweckj
  • Fronius, thanks to @farmio
  • IronOS, thanks to @tr4nt0r
  • inComfort, thanks to @jbouwh

• 2 integrations reached silver 🥈

  • Roborock, thanks to @Lash-L
  • Vodafone Station, thanks to @chemelli74

This is a huge achievement for these integrations and their maintainers. The effort and dedication required to reach these quality levels is significant, as it involves extensive testing, documentation, error handling, and often complete rewrites of parts of the integration.

A big thank you to all the contributors involved! 👏

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

• The Home Assistant Yellow Zigbee/Thread chip and Home Assistant ZBT-1 can now be updated directly through Home Assistant update entities. Nice @puddly!
• When viewing the details of an entity in the entity dialog, we now provide more context about where the entity originates. Like its device and the area it is in. This is a first step in sprinkling more context throughout our UI. Thanks, @piitaya!
• We now provide sensors about your backups! Providing you information on things like when your last backup ran. Thanks @mib1185!
• This one is interesting if you make Blueprints. The device selector now supports filtering by model ID. Thanks for this one @karwosts!
• We now support turning on/off TVs in HomeKit, nice one @bdraco!
• Thanks to @piitaya, we now support lawn mower devices in Google Assistant and HomeKit!
• Variables in automations & scripts have been greatly simplified and fixed by @arturpragacz. All variables are now accessible anywhere in the script or automation, greatly simplifying the use of variables. Amazing!
• We now support adding additional interactions to cards! The hold and double tap actions are now available through the UI. Thanks @piitaya!

Templates

If you are a power user, you probably use templatesA template is an automation definition that can include variables for the action or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions. [Learn more] in your automations, scripts, or maybe even your dashboard. This release has a few additions to our template engine that you might find useful.

To start with, in the template integration the light and switch templates have been migrated to support the new and modern YAML style. Thanks @Petro31 for this one!

More noteworthy is the addition of a series of new template functions to make working with data a lot easier:

• combine – Combine multiple dictionaries.
• difference – Find elements present in one list but not another.
• flatten – Flatten a list of lists into a single list.
• floor_entities – Retrieve entities associated with a specific floor.
• intersect – Identify common elements between lists.
• md5, sha1, sha256, sha512 – Perform common hashing operations.
• shuffle – Randomly shuffle items in a list.
• symmetric_difference – Find items in either list but not in both.
• typeof – Determine the type of a variable or object for debugging.
• union – Merge unique elements from two lists.

Device hierarchy for energy management

This release, @karwosts has introduced an improvement to Home Assistant’s energy management system—one that’s been highly requested by the community.

This means you can now create a device hierarchy within your energy configuration, establishing parent-child relationships between devices.

For example, imagine having a breaker monitoring the total energy consumption of a circuit, but also separately tracking individual devices connected to that circuit. Previously, Home Assistant might double-count this usage. Now, it understands these relationships and accurately shows the individual device usage without duplication.

In this screenshot, the water heater is a child of the heat pump. Both report energy usage separately, but the water heater’s consumption is also included in the total reported by the heat pump. With device hierarchy enabled, Home Assistant correctly shows the usage of each device.

Awesome addition there @karwosts!

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.4 in April. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday.

2025.4.1 - April 4

• Fix blocking event loop - daikin (@fredrike - #141442)
• Made Google Search enable dependent on Assist availability (@IvanLH - #141712)
• Fix humidifier platform for Comelit (@chemelli74 - #141854)
• Bump evohome-async to 1.0.5 (@zxdavb - #141871)
• Replace “to log into” with “to log in to” in incomfort (@NoRi2909 - #142060)
• Avoid unnecessary reload in apple_tv reauth flow (@emontnemery - #142079)
• Add translation for hassio update entity name (@piitaya - #142090)
• Bump pyenphase to 1.25.5 (@catsmanac - #142107)
• Hide broken ZBT-1 config entries on the hardware page (@puddly - #142110)
• Bump pysmhi to 1.0.1 (@gjohansson-ST - #142111)
• Avoid logging a warning when replacing an ignored config entry (@bdraco - #142114)
• Slow down polling in Tesla Fleet (@Bre77 - #142130)
• Bump tesla-fleet-api to v1.0.17 (@Bre77 - #142131)
• Tado bump to 0.18.11 (@erwindouna - #142175)
• Add preset mode to SmartThings climate (@joostlek - #142180)
• Do not create a HA mediaplayer for the builtin Music Assistant player (@marcelveldt - #142192)
• Do not fetch disconnected Home Connect appliances (@Diegorro98 - #142200)
• Fix fibaro setup (@rappenze - #142201)
• Fix circular mean by always storing and using the weighted one (@edenhaus - #142208)
• Bump pySmartThings to 3.0.2 (@joostlek - #142257)
• Update frontend to 20250404.0 (@bramkragten - #142274)
• Bump forecast-solar lib to v4.1.0 (@klaasnicolaas - #142280)
• Fix skyconnect tests (@zweckj - #142262)
• Fix empty actions (@Petro31 - #142292)

2025.4.2 - April 12

• Add error details in remote calendar flow (@Thomas55555 - #141753)
• Update Roborock map more consistently on state change (@Lash-L - #142228)
• Add SensorDeviceClass and unit for LCN CO2 sensor. (@alengwenus - #142320)
• Bump opower to 0.10.0 (@tronikos - #142321)
• Add a description for the enable_google_search_tool option in Google AI (@tronikos - #142322)
• Check that the current roboorck map exists before updating it. (@Lash-L - #142341)
• Limit mqtt info logging for discovery of new components (@jbouwh - #142344)
• Bump flux_led to 1.2.0 (@bdraco - #142362)
• Update aioairzone to v1.0.0 (@Noltari - #142385)
• Only load files ending .metadata.json in WebDAV (@jpbede - #142388)
• Bump aioesphomeapi to 29.9.0 (@bdraco - #142393)
• Bump opower to 0.11.1 (@tronikos - #142395)
• Add exceptions translation to SamsungTV (@chemelli74 - #142406)
• Add missing strings to Fritz (@chemelli74 - #142413)
• Fix reload of AVM FRITZ!Tools when new connected device is detected (@mib1185 - #142430)
• Fix HKC showing hvac_action as idle when fan is active and heat cool target is off (@bdraco - #142443)
• Fix Reolink smart AI sensors (@starkillerOG - #142454)
• Fix kelvin parameter in light action specifications (@epenet - #142456)
• Bump aioshelly to version 13.4.1 (@bieniu - #142477)
• Fixed Renault charge state icon (@wilfredktlr - #142478)
• Fix Shelly initialization if device runs large script (@bieniu - #142487)
• Handle None on the response candidates in Google Generative AI (@IvanLH - #142497)
• Fix range of Google Generative AI temperature (@tronikos - #142513)
• Allow max to be equal with min for mqtt number config validation (@jbouwh - #142522)
• Fix small typo in Music Assistant integration causing unavailable players (@marcelveldt - #142535)
• Fix adding devices in Husqvarna Automower (@Thomas55555 - #142549)
• Bump pyheos to v1.0.5 (@andrewsayre - #142554)
• Fix Quickmode handling in ViCare integration (@CFenner - #142561)
• Fix Core deadlock by ensuring only one ZHA log queue handler thread is running at a time (@puddly - #142568)
• Fix ssl_cert load from config_flow (@fredrike - #142570)
• Update growatt server dependency to 1.6.0 (@thimo-seitz - #142606)
• Pin multidict to >= 6.4.2 to resolve memory leaks (@bdraco - #142614)
• Bump led_ble to 1.1.7 (@henryptung - #142629)
• Bump livisi to 0.0.25 (@Thomas55555 - #142638)
• Comelit config flow timeout error (@chemelli74 - #142667)
• Fix EC certificate key not allowed in MQTT client setup (@jbouwh - #142698)
• Bump PyViCare to 2.44.0 (@CFenner - #142701)
• Bump reolink-aio 0.13.1 (@starkillerOG - #142719)
• Reolink migrate unique ID debugging (@starkillerOG - #142723)
• Update frontend to 20250411.0 (@bramkragten - #142736)
• Bump pySmartThings to 3.0.4 (@joostlek - #142739)
• Fix SmartThings gas meter (@joostlek - #142741)
• Fix Anthropic bug parsing a streaming response with no json (@allenporter - #142745)
• Upgrade sharkiq depedency to 1.1.0 (@JeffResc - #142746)
• Bump ical to 9.1.0 (@Thomas55555 - #142197)
• Add jaraco.itertools license exception as the classifier was removed but no SPDX expression was added (@sanjay900 - #142439)

2025.4.3 - April 19

• Fix duke_energy data retrieval to adhere to service start date (@cmamatey - #136054)
• Check Energy Live API works before creating the coordinator in Tessie (@Bre77 - #142510)
• Correct enum member check in home_connect (@emontnemery - #142666)
• Fix error in recurrence calculation of Habitica integration (@tr4nt0r - #142759)
• Fix MQTT device discovery when using node_id (@dionisis2014 - #142784)
• Force Squeezebox item id to string (@peteS-UK - #142793)
• Keep track of last play status update time in Apple TV (@ericswpark - #142838)
• Select correct Reolink device uid (@starkillerOG - #142864)
• Fix Reolink Home Hub Pro playback (@starkillerOG - #142871)
• Fix quality loss for LLM conversation agent question answering (@allenporter - #142873)
• Only get tracked pairs for kraken (@eifinger - #142877)
• Bump Environment Canada library to 0.10.1 (@gwww - #142882)
• Bump devolo_plc_api to 1.5.1 (@Shutgun - #142908)
• Don’t do I/O while getting Jewish calendar data schema (@tsvi - #142919)
• Update UK Transport Integration URL (@AlexLamond - #142949)
• Bump holidays to 0.70 (@gjohansson-ST - #142954)
• Fix switch state for Comelit (@chemelli74 - #142978)
• Bump reolink-aio to 0.13.2 (@starkillerOG - #142985)
• Increase uptime deviation for Shelly (@chemelli74 - #142996)
• Bump pysmhi to 1.0.2 (@gjohansson-ST - #143007)
• Add Python-2.0 to list of approved licenses (@cdce8p - #143052)
• Reduce jumping Starlink uptime sensor (@frenck - #143076)
• Bump ZHA to 0.0.56 (@puddly - #143165)
• Fix SmartThings soundbar without media playback (@joostlek - #143170)
• Fix missing binary sensor for CoolSelect+ in SmartThings (@joostlek - #143216)

2025.4.4 - April 25

• Meteofrance: adding new states provided by MF API since mid April (@vingerha - #143137)
• Create Home Connect active and selected program entities only when there are programs (@Diegorro98 - #143185)
• Météo-France: Additional states and change weather condition for “Ciel clair” (@vingerha - #143198)
• Update setuptools to 78.1.1 (@cdce8p - #143275)
• Fix licenses check for setuptools (@cdce8p - #143292)
• Add scan interval and parallel updates to LinkPlay media player (@silamon - #143324)
• Sync random sensor device classes (@silamon - #143368)
• Fix Vodafone Station config entry unload (@chemelli74 - #143371)
• Bump aiohomekit to 3.2.14 (@bdraco - #143440)
• Bump dio-chacon-api to v1.2.2 (@cnico - #143489)
• Bump pysmartthings to 3.0.5 (@joostlek - #143586)

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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

actions:
  - variables:
      x: 1
      y: 1
  - sequence:
    - variables:
        y: 2  # Updates y, which exists in the outer scope
        z: 2  # Since z is not defined yet, it is assigned in the top-level scope
  - action: persistent_notification.create
    data:
      message: ", , " # x=1, y=2, z=2
      # Note: previously, it would be: x=1, y=1, z undefined

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

• Changes to ConfigSubentryFlow
• Media player toggle action changed
• UnitSystem dataclass is now frozen

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 2025.4

We’re excited to announce the latest partner to join the Works with Home Assistant program is Motionblinds! And if you’re wondering what type of products they provide, the clue really is in the name!

Motionblinds is the first Works with Home Assistant partner to certify smart window blinds. This brings us closer to a future where you can build a smart home exclusively with certified devices that give the best possible experience with Home Assistant.  Smart blinds integrated with Home Assistant unlock powerful automations, such as blinds opening when you get home, or closing sun-facing blinds on warmer days to keep your home cool.

Shades of innovation

Motionblinds is a brand from Coulisse, a company from the Netherlands, that has been making window coverings for the past 30 years. Motionblinds are available worldwide and are known for their beautiful, customizable designs, coupled with smart technology. They not only provide all-in-one smart blinds, but also upgrade kits for your existing roller blinds, which is great for cutting down on waste.

A window to the future

Motionblinds are definitely a leader in the smart blinds space and have partnered with Eve Systems, a leading provider of smart home devices, headquartered in Germany and part of ABB. This partnership brings Matter-over-Thread to their motors. Together, we have tested and certified these Matter-certified Eve Motionblinds. It’s easy to tell which are part of Works with Home Assistant, as they’ll include the “powered by Eve” badge.

Motionblinds that use Bluetooth and 433MHz technology will also be getting the ‘Works With Home Assistant’ treatment, as we’re certifying motors that connect via the Motionblinds Matter Bridge (CM-55). This provides an excellent local way to connect this additional range of products to Home Assistant, allowing many more Motionblinds motors to give the best experience with Home Assistant. Check out our Motionblinds integrations page for a full list of the different motors that are certified. Be aware that standalone, Bluetooth-integrated blinds are not currently certified under the ‘Works With’ program.

Motionblinds Matter Bridge (CM-55)

Home Assistant was recently Matter certified, and with these blinds certified to work with Home Assistant, end-to-end these devices are going to give a seamless experience. Every Works with Home Assistant product is tested by our team, works locally, and the brand promises to provide great long-term support.

Which devices have been certified?

• Roller Shades
• Double Roller Shades
• Venetian Blinds
• Honeycomb Shades
• Curtains
• Pleated Shades
• Vertical Blinds
• Roman Shades
• Upgrade Kit for Roller Blinds

All these devices connect directly to Home Assistant via Matter, provided you pick the “powered by Eve” option, or combine with the Matter bridge. We’re big fans of open standards like Matter, because they bring great benefits when it comes to local control, privacy, and long-term support.

Closing thoughts 🪟

A big thanks to both Coulisse and Eve for putting their time and effort into bringing Motionblinds to the Works with Home Assistant program. This is really plugging a blind spot in our Works with program by covering new ground and opening up some exciting options for our community 😃.

Update: It happened and was great! Read the biggest highlights here or watch the full recording.

🚨On April 12th, we’re going live with this year’s State of the Open Home - our annual recap of the previous year and look ahead to the next. Just like past years, this live stream will be packed with awesome announcements, updates, and cool community highlights. (Got 11 hours to spare? Check out our last 5 State of live streams!)

This marks a full year since the founding of the Open Home Foundation and Home Assistant becoming part of the foundation. We’ll be taking a look back at what has been a very big year, and using this time to give you some big updates. These will include new projects becoming a part of the foundation 🚀, new supporters 🎉, and what’s in store for our Works with Home Assistant program 🤝.

We’ll also be highlighting some of the big findings of our 2024 Home Assistant survey, where over 8,500 of you told us about yourself, your homes, and how you use Home Assistant. We’ll also announce Home Assistant’s 2025 roadmap, and how your feedback is shaping the future of the Open Home.

🔔 Be sure to click to get notified when it starts (Saturday, April 12 - 18:00 GMT / 20:00 CEST / 14:00 EDT / 11:00 PDT), and we can’t wait to see you in the comments!

Matter in Home Assistant has been officially certified! 🎉 The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has certified Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation Matter Server, the first open-source project to receive this certification. Certification is proof that open source projects can sit among, or even above, big tech when it comes to providing the best smart home experience.

Home Assistant, as part of the Open Home Foundation, strongly believes in open standards. They embody our values of choice, privacy, and sustainability in the smart home. When a standard is well supported, consumers get access to a wide range of smart home devices that should work far into the future, which is great for sustainability. Best of all, they work locally, keeping your smart home data in your home.

All these benefits led us to include open standards certification in our roadmap. Home Assistant’s implementations of Matter, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are already industry-leading, so it only makes sense to clearly signal and give users peace of mind that we provide true compatibility. This most recent certification is not just big for Home Assistant, but read on to see how it also helps any open source project looking to use Matter.

Matter matters

Our live stream from 2024 explains Matter in depth

Matter is the latest smart home open standard, which is looking to connect and control smart home devices regardless of their manufacturer or which ecosystem you want to control them from. Like the other open standards we support, it can be controlled fully locally, meaning these devices are not reliant on the cloud to work. The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) is the body behind the Matter standard, representing its many members. They certify devices and set the rules on how they work together.

If you’re not familiar with Matter, I’m not surprised. Though its adoption is growing, it’s only a couple of years old. The most important companies in the smart home space have joined this standard, but support is still growing and becoming more consistent. If it fulfills its promise, any smart home product should work with your ecosystem of choice, and that makes us optimistic about its future.

More and more Matter devices are entering the market, and if you’re buying new smart devices, it will just be a matter of time 😉 before you own one. To this point, Matter devices are even a part of our Works With Home Assistant program. Aqara was the first to join our program with Matter devices, and we tested these devices ourselves to ensure they give the best experience possible in Home Assistant. This year, we expect many more Matter devices to join the program, and we should have more updates soon.

From a technical perspective, Matter is really interesting—it can work with different smart home systems at the same time. It also keeps the way devices connect and communicate separate, allowing it to connect to devices over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Thread (a new mesh network technology for smart devices). Read our State of Matter blog or watch Paulus’ appearance on the Vergecast Matter Holiday Spec-Tacular for a deeper dive into the standard.

What certification brings

Well, this is a bit... awesome

First and foremost, from a usability perspective, nothing will change for you. We are consistently the first to adopt the newest Matter versions, currently providing the highest version available. We’ll keep on improving the Matter Server and the Matter integration at the same pace, ensuring that all device types in the Matter spec will work perfectly with Home Assistant—just from now on it will come with this certification badge.

The Open Home Foundation Matter Server is now an officially trusted/certified software component, while Home Assistant is a certified “User Interface Component” (more on this distinction below). This allows us to clearly show this with a logo, along with being listed on the Matter website. For new Home Assistant users, this helps build confidence, knowing it is a supported way to use Matter. Similarly, for brands that don’t know much about Home Assistant, these references can be surprisingly helpful, and it’s our goal to have more brands target Home Assistant in their development. Another handy part of being certified is getting more access to pre-test new devices and SDK revisions, which will help development going forward.

Why two certifications (and the server add-on)

So much fun we did it twice

If you’re confused why we certified both Home Assistant and Open Home Foundation Matter Server, there are a couple of legal/procedural reasons, but it comes with some useful benefits. We certified the server as a standalone component to allow any project to use it. Each project that uses it, including Home Assistant, will have to go through a certification process to acknowledge that it uses a certified component as a “User Interface Component”. Certification for the Open Home Foundation Matter Server means it properly connects and communicates with other Matter devices, while certification for Home Assistant is about being able to display the Matter trademark.

This separation is important because it means that we won’t need to go through recertification every time we update Home Assistant. This way we can keep the Matter-related backend isolated in both a software and certification sense. This is also why we will need to continue to have the Open Home Foundation Matter Server as an add-on, and it cannot be built into Home Assistant Core.

The road to certification

Becoming Matter certified was not easy. When we started certification, the process was tooled up to test and certify devices, not Matter controllers, let alone completely software-based (and open source) controllers. We chose to collaborate with Resillion for our certification. They are a testing and certification house based in Belgium with a lot of experience certifying Matter products. They do the formal testing and submit the results to the CSA. Together, we collaborated to write thousands of lines of test scripts, ensuring that as many test cases as possible were automated.

My visit to Resillion's lab, I brought my own lab coat

We really appreciate Resillion for taking on this challenge. Not only were we the first controller they certified, but we also went for all the device types in the Matter 1.3 specification. This was a huge effort for all involved, but now that these test scripts exist, they only require minor updates for each new version; we can reuse them whenever we need to recertify.

This is another example of something that’s only possible because of the support we get from users subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud. Certification would be very difficult for any other open-source project, but we have the funding first to build a great server and also to pay for the required testing. Now this open source implementation exists and can be used by any project looking to add Matter.

The future Matters

As we continue improving our Matter implementation, the Matter standard itself is also evolving. Even with the progress it has made in the past year, there are still challenges to overcome. Matter is completely built on IPv6, and its rollout is uncovering the poor state of IPv6 support in today’s network hardware. Also, as it’s a complicated standard, it can be difficult to explain concepts like Thread and Fabrics to the average user, but hopefully users won’t need to be experts in the future to get the most out of Matter in their homes.

Some might call Matter the smart home standard to replace all others, but we believe that there’s room for multiple standards, each providing its own unique benefits. We are focused on providing the highest support for all local smart home standards (certifying other standards is on our roadmap) and ensuring they work far into the future, which is great for consumer choice and sustainability.

As Home Assistant grows and takes important steps like certification, the more credibility we gain in the industry—it’s a virtuous circle that helps us and Open Home projects continuously improve. Thanks for your support and helping us make this possible 🙏.

Try the Matter in Home Assistant today:

Home Assistant 2025.3! 🎉

But! Before I dive into the release, let me quickly catch you up on things you might have missed. There is a lot of cool stuff happening lately!

We had a live stream about Assist: Voice chapter 9! Here we announced Speech-to-Phrase, a voice recognition technology that is blazing fast and super accurate, even on a Raspberry Pi! 🚀

I’m also super stoked about the announcement that Apollo Automation has joined the Works with Home Assistant program 🥰

And our friends at Music Assistant have shipped their next big hit! With awesome new features like Spotify Connect, Assist optimization, an equalizer, and podcast & audiobook support. 🎶

Great stuff, right? But this release today is also packed with amazing things!

After a few releases focusing on backups, we are back with a release packed with new features and improvements, mostly focusing on dashboards! 🤩

The new abilities, the tile card’s fine-tuning, and the dashboard view’s new headers are really cool; I can’t wait to see screenshots of your dashboards with these new features! 📸

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

• Dashboard view headers
• Tile cards
  • Making tile card interactions clearer
  • Position tile card features
  • New tile card features
    • Switch toggle
    • Counter actions
  • Tiny interaction improvements
  • Editor improvements
• Assist chat now has streaming responses
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • SmartThings
• Other noteworthy changes
• Iterating on the legends of graphs
• Grouping/clustering of trackables on the maps
• Patch releases
  • 2025.3.1 - March 7
  • 2025.3.2 - March 11
  • 2025.3.3 - March 14
  • 2025.3.4 - March 21
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Dashboard view headers

This release brings a whole new look with the ability to add headers to your dashboards. This allows you to add a title and welcoming text to your dashboards using Markdown and even templates. Additionally, this gives you a lot of space for badges next to the header.

As always, we’ve baked in a lot of customization, with the ability to align the header in multiple different ways. It comes with a responsive layout by default, but you can also set it to always be left-aligned or center-aligned.

The badges can also be positioned below the text (default) or above the text. A great visual menu makes it easy to choose how you want to organize your header.

Tile cards

This release has made many improvements and fine touches to the tile card. It is one of the most versatile cards in Home Assistant, and we have made it even better!

Making tile card interactions clearer

There is no doubt the tile card can do a lot, but ever since its creation, it has had a little flaw that you might have run into yourself…

How would you know if tapping the icon on the tile card would trigger an action or whether it would just display more information? We have addressed this with some subtle visual language in this release!

When tapping the icon on the tile card directly performs an action, like for example, turning on a light, the icon will have a circular background around it. In all other cases, the little circle will not be displayed.

Now you know! 👍

Position tile card features

Since we added support for resizing cards, we gained the ability to make very wide tile cards. These cards have a lot of empty space surrounding them, which can be helpful at times.

But what if you could do something useful with that space? Now you can! All features of a tile card can now be positioned inline in the tile card!

This brings a completely new look and feel, which we are sure you will love! From the settings, you can add a feature, like a brightness slider, and position it either below (bottom) or to the right side of the icon (inline).

New tile card features

This release also ships with two new tile card features that can be added to your entities to provide new controls. @jpbede contributed these, so a big shout out to him!

Switch toggle

The first addition is one that is just surprising we didn’t have it before: A switch toggle! This allows you to toggle a switch entity directly from the tile card.

Counter actions

The second addition is a counter toggle. This allows you to add a button to increase, decrease, or reset a counter entity directly from the tile card.

Tiny interaction improvements

More tweaks to the tile card have been made to improve their interaction experience. For example, we now have nice little animations when you hover over the tile card, making it more apparent that it is interactive. Still, when you tap the tile card, it will show a little animation to indicate that the tap was registered.

Another nice addition is that the tile card can now interact with your keyboard! Tab and shift + tab your way across the screen like the keyboard warrior you are.

Editor improvements

Not just the tile card itself has been improved, but also the editor for the tile card has been improved. It is now clearer and easier to use.

The new control gives you a better overview of what the option will do for the tile card.

Assist chat now has streaming responses

If you have hooked up an LLM, like ChatGPT, to your Assist as a conversation agent, it will now livestream the responses to you when you are text chatting with it!

When experimenting with larger models, or on slower hardware, LLM’s can feel sluggish. They only respond once the entire reply is generated, which can take frustratingly long for lengthy responses (you’ll be waiting a while if you ask it to tell you an epic fairy tale).

We’ve added support for LLMs to stream their response to the text chat, allowing you to start reading while the response is being generated. A bonus side effect is that commands are now also faster: they will be executed as soon as they come in, without waiting for the rest of the message to be complete.

There was quite a lot more to tell around Assist and the new voice features; in case you missed it, you can read all about it in this blog post:

📰 Speech-to-Phrase brings voice home - Voice chapter 9

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Azure Storage, added by @zweckj
  Use Azure Storage as a target location for your backups.
• IOmeter, added by @MaestroOnICe
  Read out your IOmeter device data locally.
• PG LAB Electronics, added by @pglab-electronics
  Control your PG LAB Electronics devices from Home Assistant.
• SensorPush Cloud, added by @sstallion
  Integrate your SensorPush devices with Home Assistant, using their cloud service.
• SNOO, added by @Lash-L
  Get the state of your SNOO Smart Sleeper Bassinet into Home Assistant.
• WebDAV, added by @jpbede
  Use any WebDAV compatible service as a target location for your backups.

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

• Burbank Water and Power (BWP), provided by Opower, added by @tronikos
• Heicko, provided by Motionblinds, added by @starkillerOG
• LINAK, provided by Idasen Desk, added by @abmantis
• Linx, provided by Motionblinds, added by @starkillerOG
• Smart Rollos, provided by Motionblinds, added by @starkillerOG
• Ublockout, provided by Motionblinds, added by @starkillerOG

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• @MartinHjelmare and @Diegorro98 have been putting in a lot of effort to bring the Home Connect integration to the next level. Nice!
• Got an ESPHome device that is acting up? @bdraco has added a new option to the integration to let Home Assistant shadowlog the device logs. Helpful!
• The OpenAI conversation integration now supports the o1, o1-preview, o1-mini, and o3-mini reasoning models. Thanks, @Shulyaka!
• The Shelly integration now supports the 4th generation of the Shelly Flood sensors and added support for Shelly script events entities. Thanks, @chemelli74 and @wjtje!
• Support for the Switchbot Remote has been added to the Switchbot integration. Thanks, @awahlig!
• UniFi version 9 introduced zone-based rules. These are now supported by Unifi integration. Thanks, @Samywamy10!
• @Galorhallen has added support for effects in Govee lights. Nice!

SmartThings

The SmartThings integration has been completely rewritten! 🎉 In December, SmartThings shut down the old authentication method, but thanks to SmartThings’ hard work and close collaboration with us, @joostlek was able to bring back the integration—better than ever.

No more setting up routing, exposing ports, or creating developer accounts with access tokens—just log in with your Samsung account, and you’re good to go!

And there’s more! Push updates now work without exposing your instance to the internet, making the experience faster, seamless, and more secure! 🚀

A huge shoutout to our amazing community, who played a key role in this effort! 💙 When @joostlek shared a guide on gathering test data, the community stepped up—sending in valuable test data that helped fine-tune the integration. This collaboration truly made a difference!

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

• Ever upgraded Home Assistant and needed to do a hard refresh in your browser to make it work again? We have been able to reduce the cases in which this happens! Thanks, @bramkragten!
• @balloob made a small change with a big impact. When you set up a new integration for a new device, Home Assistant will now redirect you to the device page after setting it up. Nice!
• There is now an option to add an extra margin to the top of a section view. Thanks, @piitaya!
• The add/edit area dialog has been improved and compacted. They are much more pleasant to use now. Thanks, @jpbede!
• We now have a device class for the wind direction sensors! Thanks, @edenhaus!
• @jschlyter has added the energy distance device class for sensors, which supports the following units: kWh/100mi, kWh/100km, and mi/kWh, including conversion between them. Awesome!
• Media player entities that support browsing media now have a new action available to browse media as an action with a response. Thanks, @PeteRager!
• @rikroe has added an action to retrieve the configuration of a schedule helper. Thanks!

Iterating on the legends of graphs

Last release, we made quite a big change to the charts by replacing the software we use to make these graphs in Home Assistant. Things changed behind the scenes, but our aim to start was to make it look and feel similar.

However, we received a lot of feedback from the community that the legends shown on the new graphs were suboptimal. Our UX and frontend teams have been working hard to improve this situation and make the new graph legends more similar to the old ones.

By default, we show the legend below the graph and show as many data points as possible. If there are too many, they will be displayed on demand using the little ellipsis button.

When using these cards on your dashboard, if you want to always show the full legend, a new option will allow you to keep it fully visible.

You can now also zoom in and out, by double clicking on a graph. If you want more control over the range you want to view in your graph, you can press the ctrl/cmd key and then select the range on the graph you want to zoom in on.

Grouping/clustering of trackables on the maps

The map card is perfect for visualizing your entities’ locations, but when too many cluster together in the same spot, it can get a bit cluttered.

To tackle this, we’ve introduced marker clustering, which groups nearby entities together, making it easier to see them at a glance. When zooming in, the markers ‘spider’ out, showing individual entity locations with a connecting line to their original positions. You can temporarily disable clustering with a simple toggle.

Thanks @jpbede and @marcinbauer85 for this awesome improvement!

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.3 in March. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday.

2025.3.1 - March 7

• Check support for demand load control in SmartThings AC (@Ishima - #139616)
• Fix Unit of Measurement for Squeezebox duration sensor entity on LMS service (@peteS-UK - #139861)
• Trim the Schema allowed keys to match the Public Gemini API docs. (@IvanLH - #139876)
• Bump thermobeacon-ble to 0.8.1 (@bdraco - #139919)
• Deduplicate climate modes in SmartThings (@joostlek - #139930)
• Check if the unit of measurement is valid before creating the entity (@jbouwh - #139932)
• Bump pysmartthings to 2.6.1 (@joostlek - #139936)
• Bump aiowebdav2 to 0.4.0 (@jpbede - #139938)
• Add config entry level diagnostics to SmartThings (@joostlek - #139939)
• Set content length when uploading files to WebDAV (@jpbede - #139950)
• Bump to python-snoo 0.6.1 (@Lash-L - #139954)
• Fix SmartThings fan (@joostlek - #139962)
• Update frontend to 20250306.0 (@bramkragten - #139965)
• Fix SmartThings dust sensor UoM (@joostlek - #139977)
• Bump nexia to 2.2.2 (@bdraco - #139986)
• Bump aiowebdav2 to 0.4.1 (@jpbede - #139988)
• Correctly retrieve only loaded Google Generative AI config_entries (@IvanLH - #139999)
• Fix regression to evohome debug logging (@zxdavb - #140000)
• Check operation state on Home Connect program sensor update (@Diegorro98 - #140011)
• Bump aiohomeconnect to 0.16.3 (@MartinHjelmare - #140014)
• Fix powerwall 0% in Tessie and Tesla Fleet (@Bre77 - #140017)
• Fix shift state default in Teslemetry and Tessie (@Bre77 - #140018)
• Add description for HomematicIP HCU1 in homematicip_cloud setup config flow (@hahn-th - #140025)
• Fix evohome to gracefully handle null schedules (@zxdavb - #140036)
• Fix SmartThings disabling working capabilities (@joostlek - #140039)
• Fix SmartThings thermostat climate check (@joostlek - #140046)
• Bump pysmartthings to 2.7.0 (@joostlek - #140047)
• Only keep valid powerConsumptionReports in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140049)
• Bump py-synologydsm-api to 2.7.1 (@mib1185 - #140052)
• Restore SmartThings button event (@joostlek - #140044)

2025.3.2 - March 11

• Don’t allow creating backups if Home Assistant is not running (@emontnemery - #139499)
• Bump govee_ble to 0.43.1 (@moosilauke18 - #139862)
• Label emergency heat switch (@jrhillery - #139872)
• Bump sense-energy lib to 0.13.7 (@kbickar - #140068)
• Update jinja to 3.1.6 (@frenck - #140069)
• Update evohome-async to 1.0.3 (@zxdavb - #140083)
• Fix HEOS discovery error when previously ignored (@andrewsayre - #140091)
• Map prewash job state in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140097)
• Check support for thermostat operating state in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140103)
• Handle None options in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140110)
• Fix MQTT JSON light not reporting color temp status if color is not supported (@jbouwh - #140113)
• Fix HEOS user initiated setup when discovery is waiting confirmation (@andrewsayre - #140119)
• Support null supported Thermostat modes in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140101)
• Set device class for Oven Completion time in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140139)
• Revert “Check if the unit of measurement is valid before creating the entity” (@jbouwh - #140155)
• Fix the order of the group members attribute of the Music Assistant integration (@msm595 - #140204)
• Fix events without user in Bring integration (@tr4nt0r - #140213)
• Log broad exception in Electricity Maps config flow (@jpbede - #140219)
• Bump evohome-async to 1.0.4 to fix #140194 (@zxdavb - #140230)
• Refresh Home Connect token during config entry setup (@Diegorro98 - #140233)
• Add 900 RPM option to washer spin speed options at Home Connect (@Diegorro98 - #140234)
• Fix todo tool broken with Gemini 2.0 models. (@Lash-L - #140246)
• Fix version not always available in onewire (@epenet - #140260)
• Fix client_id not generated when connecting to the MQTT broker (@jbouwh - #140264)
• Bump velbusaio to 2025.3.0 (@cereal2nd - #140267)
• Fix dryer operating state in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140277)
• FGLair : Upgrade to ayla-iot-unofficial 1.4.7 (@crevetor - #140296)
• Bump pyheos to v1.0.3 (@andrewsayre - #140310)
• Bump ZHA to 0.0.52 (@puddly - #140325)
• Bump pydrawise to 2025.3.0 (@dknowles2 - #140330)
• Bump teslemetry-stream (@Bre77 - #140335)
• Fix no temperature unit in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140363)
• Fix double space quoting in WebDAV (@jpbede - #140364)
• Bump python-roborock to 2.12.2 (@Lash-L - #140368)
• Handle incomplete power consumption reports in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140370)
• Fix browsing Audible Favorites in Sonos (@PeteRager - #140378)
• Make sure SmartThings light can deal with unknown states (@joostlek - #140190)
• Delete subscription on shutdown of SmartThings (@joostlek - #140135)

2025.3.3 - March 14

• Fix bug with all Roborock maps being set to the wrong map when empty (@Lash-L - #138493)
• Bump pysuezV2 to 2.0.4 (@jb101010-2 - #139824)
• Bump upb-lib to 0.6.1 (@gwww - #140212)
• Use only IPv4 for zeroconf in bluesound integration (@LouisChrist - #140226)
• Only do WebDAV path migration when path differs (@jpbede - #140402)
• Bump velbusaio to 2025.3.1 (@cereal2nd - #140443)
• Mark value in number.set_value action as required (@joostlek - #140445)
• Bump Tesla Fleet API to 0.9.13 (@Bre77 - #140485)
• Update xknxproject to 3.8.2 (@farmio - #140499)
• Fix Shelly diagnostics for devices without WebSocket Outbound support (@bieniu - #140501)
• Fix windowShadeLevel capability in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140552)
• Set unit of measurement for SmartThings oven setpoint (@joostlek - #140560)
• Fix missing UnitOfPower.MILLIWATT in sensor and number allowed units (@ashionky - #140567)

2025.3.4 - March 21

• Fix initial fetch of Home Connect appliance data to handle API rate limit errors (@Diegorro98 - #139379)
• Handle API rate limit error on Home Connect entities fetch (@Diegorro98 - #139384)
• Album art not available for Sonos media library favorites (@PeteRager - #140557)
• Change max ICP value to fixed value for Wallbox Integration (@hesselonline - #140592)
• Add 700 RPM option to washer spin speed options at Home Connect (@Diegorro98 - #140607)
• Handle non documented options at Home Connect select entities (@Diegorro98 - #140608)
• Fix optional password in Velbus config flow (@cereal2nd - #140615)
• Make Oven setpoint follow temperature UoM in SmartThings (@joostlek - #140666)
• Fix Elk-M1 missing TLS 1.2 check (@gwww - #140672)
• Bump PySwitchBot to 0.57.1 (@bdraco - #140681)
• Check Celsius in SmartThings oven setpoint (@joostlek - #140687)
• Fix broken core integration Smart Meter Texas by switching it to use HA’s SSL Context (@adamfeldman - #140694)
• Don’t reload onedrive on options flow (@zweckj - #140712)
• Bump pySmartThings to 2.7.4 (@joostlek - #140720)
• Fix SmartThings ACs without supported AC modes (@joostlek - #140744)
• Bump pylamarzocco to 1.4.9 (@zweckj - #140916)
• Log SmartThings subscription error on exception (@joostlek - #140939)
• Ensure file is correctly uploaded by the GenAI SDK (@IvanLH - #140969)
• Reolink fix playback headers (@starkillerOG - #141015)
• Fix some Home Connect options keys (@Diegorro98 - #141023)
• Bump ZHA to 0.0.53 (@puddly - #141025)
• Bump Python-Snoo to 0.6.3 (@Lash-L - #140628)
• Bump python-snoo to 0.6.4 (@Lash-L - #141030)
• Improve Home Connect appliances test fixture (@MartinHjelmare - #139787)

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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

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

• Backup agents
• Changed config entry state transitions
• Changes to the BackupAgent API
• Energy by distance units
• New checks for config flow unique ID
• Relocate dhcp/ssdp/usb/zeroconf ServiceInfo models
• Support for config subentries

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 2025.3

Over the past several months, Music Assistant has been hitting all the right notes with new features, greater stability, and a crescendo of contributors who keep pushing the project forward. If you’re unfamiliar with Music Assistant, it allows you to merge your libraries from leading audio streaming providers and local files, letting you play them on the most popular smart speakers. Since our last update, Music Assistant has had a couple of big releases, but our most recent might just be our platinum record 💿, with a lot of new functionality coming in version 2.4. In case you’ve missed the last few updates, here are the biggest additions.

Table of contents

• Optimized for Assist
• External audio & Spotify Connect
• Podcasts & Audiobooks
• More players and providers
• Equalizer control & features
• Home Assistant improvements
• More stable streaming
• Get Music Assistant 2.4 today!

“Say My Name”

Optimized for Assist

We should have called it Hi-Fi edition

The most recent release has some great advancements for Assist devices, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. We’ve been working closely with the ESPHome team to ensure the most optimal audio streaming experience, which has helped make Assist devices into very capable media players. The community has even added some great functionality to fully control your media player with your voice, including choosing songs, artists, and more. Voice Preview Edition has a high-quality DAC that provides very clean audio playback from its 3.5mm jack, allowing you to stream lossless audio to connected speakers (this $59 device puts some of my expensive Hi-Fi gear to shame!).

“Across the Universe”

External audio & Spotify Connect

Spotify Connect on Voice Preview Edition

Another feature in the latest release is support for “external audio sources”, which can be provided either by players themselves (source control) or with plugins. The first plugin to deliver this functionality is Spotify Connect. It’s the easiest way to use Spotify with Music Assistant, and can be enabled on any player. This makes any Music Assistant supported device a Spotify Connect supported device (can confirm, Voice Preview Edition is great for this). To get started go to Music Assistant’s settings, add the Spotify Connect Plugin, choose the devices you would like it to use, and within Spotify you will see the device as a player. Just note, Spotify Connect requires a Premium account to work.

We’ve got our sights set on adding even more plugins like this down the line (AirPlay, anyone?). We’re also hard at work making the whole setup process super simple, particularly for those using the Voice Preview Edition who might not need every single Music Assistant feature, but still want this simple casting capability.

“Radio Ga Ga”

Podcasts & Audiobooks

The full book's progress is tracked, and chapters are clearly shown

Your library just got a whole lot bigger! Music Assistant now has native support for podcasts and audiobooks. For podcasts, several providers have been added, including Subsonic, YouTube, and RSS feeds. Audiobooks can be added via two brand new providers: Audible and Audiobookshelf, or imported directly from your local files. Audiobook playback presents the entire book as a single bar with dots showing each chapter (even if the book is separated into multiple files), allowing you to really track your progress. The entire core has been adjusted to keep better track of your progress through any media, so you will always resume where you left off.

The "Continue listening" section on the home page takes you back to where you left off

“New Sensation”

More players and providers

Shortly after our last blog post, we added support for Apple Music which was one of the most requested additions in the comments. A couple of other new providers were added, including iBroadcast and SiriusXM. For new hardware support we’ve added support for Bluesound players. If you have a provider or player you love and want to see it in Music Assistant, request it—but better yet join us in developing it!

“All About That Bass”

Equalizer control & features

Make your own EQ settings or import pre-made settings for your speaker

When we released 2.0 there were basic bass and treble controls for devices, but with our new configurable DSP (Digital Signal Processor) you can now fine-tune your audio like never before. This includes input and output gain, along with a powerful parametric equalizer that can be applied per player 📈. You can conveniently view the entire audio pipeline by clicking the quality indicator icon.

Another useful feature added was a “Don’t stop the music” mode that keeps music playing even once your queue finishes, playing similar songs from your library. Another way to keep the music playing is through lock screens and widget controls built into many popular operating systems, which can now control Music Assistant.

“Master of Puppets”

Home Assistant improvements

Home Assistant was always designed to work seamlessly with Music Assistant, and it’s only getting better. In the Home Assistant 2024.12 release, we gave the community a Christmas present–Music Assistant moved from HACS to being a native integration (please migrate if you haven’t yet).

Many people now add all their players to Music Assistant first and then integrate Music Assistant with Home Assistant, eliminating the need to add each device separately. The most recent release added the ability to outsource any player control, including volume or turning it on/off, to a Home Assistant entity. There are other benefits to using them together, like Music Assistant resuming audio playback after an announcement or using Assist to find and play a song (with or without LLMs).

“D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Beat”

More stable streaming

One of the biggest goals for every release is to improve streaming stability across all providers and players. With every release, we’ve been improving stability, and since our last post, we’ve had a big influx of users who have been finding and helping squash bugs. There have been nice improvements to almost every provider helping with stability, speed, and quality. Just in the next patch release 2.4.3, we’ve improved streaming performance on slower network connections. The goal is that the music never stops.

“Praise You” - 🙏

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to this release—whether through code, testing, or feedback. Your support keeps Music Assistant evolving into the ultimate tool for managing your music, on your players.

“Drop It Like It’s Hot”

Get Music Assistant 2.4 today!

If you haven’t updated yet, now’s the time! And if you haven’t used it yet, you can install Music Assistant as a Home Assistant Add-on,

For more on getting started with Music Assistant, read the documentation.

Have feedback or want to contribute? Join our growing community on GitHub and Discord!

Happy listening!

Apollo Automation has joined the Works with Home Assistant program. Certifying three of their newest devices, including their community favorite presence and air quality multisensors, giving users the best possible experience when using these devices with Home Assistant.

Notably, these are the first ESPHome-based devices to receive Works with Home Assistant certification. Apollo is one of the first movers in an important trend that we’re very excited about: Home Assistant community members turning their open projects into viable businesses that support a thriving Open Home ecosystem.

Background

Apollo Automation is a growing family-run business rooted in the Home Assistant and ESPHome communities. And yes, they’re named after their German Shepherd, Apollo 🐕.

Two years ago, they started sharing their designs for a new impressively small ESPHome-powered multisensor with the community. Getting feedback, sharing iterations, and working collaboratively, they turned that sensor into a full-fledged product, which was built to work with Home Assistant. They have continued this open, community-first approach and have now built several even more refined multisensors.

A multisensor for ants? 🐜

Home Assistant is the only true smart home platform because it gives everyone full control to build and create. ESPHome is the ultimate smart device platform, and it is fostering an entirely new ecosystem of Open Home projects. ESPHome works fully locally, and it’s a modder’s paradise, allowing users to build DIY smart home devices (check out the getting started with ESPHome guide).

Creators can also use it to build pre-built, plug-and-play products that give users a really seamless experience. With devices being discovered and easily added to your Wi-Fi network and Home Assistant, along with a one-click update within Home Assistant.

ESPHome and Home Assistant allows anyone to turn their passion for building cool things into a career, and the things they build help support a more vibrant Open Home. Apollo is an exciting new partner for the Works with Home Assistant program and should serve as an inspiration to all aspiring makers in our community.

Devices

Works with Home Assistant differs from other certification programs as products are rigorously tested in-house to ensure they work seamlessly out of the box. Any company joining also commits to providing long-term support and firmware updates, while being a positive force in the Home Assistant community. Works with Home Assistant is operated by the Open Home Foundation, and it is the support of Home Assistant Cloud subscribers that funds this work.

Apollo has chosen first to certify three products, which include:

• MTR-1 Multi-Target Radar Multisensor For Home Assistant (LD2450) - A tiny, but powerful radar-based (mmWave) presence sensor that can pack in many other sensors.
• MSR-2 mmWave Multisensor For Home Assistant (LD2410B) - An even smaller multisensor that is the successor of the initial community feedback-driven design.
• AIR-1 Air Quality Sensor For Home Assistant - A small air quality multisensor that can be extended to incorporate a huge variety of sensors.

We anticipate that Apollo will bring more of their lineup into the program, and we are excited to see their new innovations going forward! This is just the start of a year of many new Works with Home Assistant announcements, so please stay tuned!

Welcome to Voice chapter 9 🎉 part of our long-running series following the development of open voice.

We’re still pumped from the launch of the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition at the end of December. It sold out 23 minutes into our announcement - wow! We’ve been working hard to keep it in stock at all our distributors.

Today, we have a lot of cool stuff to improve your experience with Voice PE or any other Assist satellite you’re using. This includes fully local and offline voice control that can be powered by nearly any Home Assistant system.

• Voice for the masses
• Building an Open Voice Ecosystem
• Large language model improvements
• Expanding Voice Capabilities
• Home Assistant phones home: analog phones are back!
• Wyoming improvements
• 🫵 Help us bring choice to voice!

Dragon NaturallySpeaking was a popular speech recognition program introduced in 1997. To run this software you needed at least a 133 MHz Pentium processor, 32 MB of RAM, and Windows 95 or later. Nearly thirty years later, Speech-to-Text is much better, but needs orders of magnitude more resources.

Incredible technologies are being developed in speech processing, but it’s currently unrealistic for a device that costs less than $100 to take real advantage of them. It’s possible, of course, but running the previously recommended Speech-to-Text tool, Whisper, on a Raspberry Pi 4 takes at least 5 seconds to turn your speech into text, with varying levels of success. This is why we ended up recommending at least an Intel N100 to run your voice assistant fully locally. That stung. Our opt-in analytics shows over 50% of the Home Assistant OS users are running their homes on affordable, low-powered machines like the Home Assistant Green or a Raspberry Pi.

What’s more, advancing the development of Whisper is largely in the hands of OpenAI, as we don’t have the resources required to add languages to that tool. We could add every possible language to Home Assistant, but if any single part of our voice pipeline lacks language support, it renders voice unusable for that language. As a result, many widely spoken languages were unsupported for local voice control.

This left many users unable to use voice to control their smart home without purchasing extra hardware or services. We’re changing this today with the launch of a key new piece of our voice pipeline.

Voice for the masses

Speech-to-Phrase is based on old, almost ancient, voice technology by today’s standards. Instead of the ability to transcribe virtually any speech into text, it is limited to a set of pre-trained phrases. Speech-to-Phrase will automatically generate the phrases and fine-tune a model based on the devices, areas, and sentence triggers in your Home Assistant server - 100% locally and offline.

The result: speech transcribed in under a second on a Home Assistant Green or Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 5 processes commands seven times faster, clocking in at 150 milliseconds per command!

With great speed comes some limitations. Speech-to-Phrase only supports a subset of Assist’s voice commands, and more open-ended things like shopping lists, naming a timer, and broadcasts are not usable out of the box. Really any commands that can accept random words (wildcards) will not work. For the same reasons, Speech-to-Phrase is intended for home control only and not LLMs.

The most important home control commands are supported, including turning lights on and off, changing brightness and color, getting the weather, setting timers, and controlling media players. Custom sentences can also be added to trigger things not covered by the current commands, and we expect the community will come up with some clever new ways to use this tech.

All you need to get started with voice

Speech-to-Phrase is launching with support for English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian - covering nearly 70% of Home Assistant users. Nice. Unlike the local Speech-to-Text tools currently available, adding languages to Speech-to-Phrase is much easier. This means many more languages will be available in future releases, and we would love your help adding them!

We’re working on updating the Voice wizard to include Speech-to-Phrase. Until then, you need to install the add-on manually:

Building an Open Voice Ecosystem

When we launched Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, we didn’t just launch a product; we kickstarted an ecosystem. We did this by open-sourcing all parts and ensuring that the voice experience built into Home Assistant is not tied to a single product. Any voice assistant built for the Open Home ecosystem can take advantage of all this work. Even your DIY ones!

With ESPHome 2025.2, which we’re releasing next week, any ESPHome-based voice assistant will support making broadcasts (more on that below), and they will also be able to use our new voice wizard to ensure new users have everything they need to get started.

This will include updates for the $13 Atom Echo and ESP32-S3-Box-3 devices that we used for development during the Year of the Voice!

New broadcast feature in action with Atom and Box 3

Large language model improvements

We aim for Home Assistant to be the place for experimentation with AI in the smart home. We support a wide range of models, both local and cloud-based, and are constantly improving the different ways people can interact with them. We’re always running benchmarks to track the best models, and make sure our changes lead to an improved experience.

If you set up Assist, Home Assistant’s built-in voice assistant, and configure it to use an LLM, you might have noticed some new features landing recently. One major change was the new “prefer handling commands locally” setting, which always attempts to run commands with the built-in conversation agent before it sends it off to an LLM. We noticed many easy-to-run commands were being sent to an LLM, which can slow down things and waste tokens. If Home Assistant understands the command (e.g., turn on the lights), it will perform the necessary action, and only passes it on to your chosen LLM if it doesn’t understand the command (e.g., what’s the air quality like now).

Adding the above features made us realize that LLMs need to understand the commands handled locally. Now, the conversation history is shared with the LLM. The context allows you to ask the LLM for follow-up questions that refer to recent commands, regardless of whether they helped process the request.

Left: without shared conversations. Right: Shared conversations enable GPT to understand context.

Reducing the time to first word with streaming

When experimenting with larger models, or on slower hardware, LLM’s can feel sluggish. They only respond once the entire reply is generated, which can take frustratingly long for lengthy responses (you’ll be waiting a while if you ask it to tell you an epic fairy tale).

In Home Assistant 2025.3 we’re introducing support for LLMs to stream their response to the chat, allowing users to start reading while the response is being generated. A bonus side effect is that commands are now also faster: they will be executed as soon as they come in, without waiting for the rest of the message to be complete.

Streaming is coming initially for Ollama and OpenAI.

Model Context Protocol brings Home Assistant to every AI

In November 2024, Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It is a new protocol to allow LLMs to control external services. In this release, contributed by Allen Porter, Home Assistant can speak MCP.

Using the new Model Context Protocol integration, Home Assistant can integrate external MCP servers and make their tools available to LLMs that Home Assistant talks to (for your voice assistant or in automations). There is quite a collection of MCP servers, including wild ones like scraping websites (tutorial), file server access, or even BlueSky.

With the new Model Context Protocol server integration, Home Assistant’s LLM tools can be included in other AI apps, like the Claude desktop app (tutorial). If agentic AI takes off, your smart home will be ready to be integrated.

Thanks Allen!

Expanding Voice Capabilities

We keep enhancing the capabilities of the built-in conversation agent of Home Assistant. With the latest release, we’re unlocking two new features:

“Broadcast that it’s time for dinner”

The new broadcast feature lets you quickly send messages to the other Assist satellites in your home. This makes it possible to announce it’s time for dinner, or announce battles between your children 😅.

“Set the temperature to 19 degrees”

Previously Assist could only tell you the temperature, but now it can help you change the temperature of your HVAC system. Perfect for changing the temperature while staying cozy under a warm blanket.

Home Assistant phones home: analog phones are back!

Two years ago, we introduced the world’s most private voice assistant: an analog phone! Users can pick it up to talk to their smart home, and only the user can hear the response. A fun feature we’re adding today is that Home Assistant can now call your analog phone!

Analog phones are great when you want to notify a room, instead of an entire home. For instance, when the laundry is done, you can notify someone in the living room, but not the office. Also since the user needs to pick up the horn to receive the call, you will know if your notification was received.

Have your Home Assistant give you a call

If you’re using an LLM as your voice assistant, you can also start a conversation from a phone call. You can provide the opening sentence and via a new “extra system prompt” option, provide extra context to the LLM to interpret the response from the user. For example,

• Extra system context: garage door cover.garage_door was left open for 30 minutes. We asked the user if it should be closed
• Assistant: should the garage door be closed?
• User: sure

Thanks JaminH for the contribution.

Wyoming improvements

Wyoming is our standard for linking together all the different parts needed to build a voice assistant. Home Assistant 2025.3 will add support for announcements to Wyoming satellites, making them eligible for the new broadcast feature too.  

We’re also adding a new microWakeWord add-on (the same wake word engine running on Voice PE!) that can be used as an alternative to openWakeWord. As we collect more real-world samples from our Wake Word Collective, the models included in microWakeWord will be retrained and improved.

🫵 Help us bring choice to voice!

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again—the era of open voice has begun, and the more people who join us, the better it gets. Home Assistant offers many ways to start with voice control, whether by building your own Assist hardware or getting a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. With every update, you’ll see new features, and you’ll get to preview the future of voice today.

A huge thanks to all the language leaders and contributors helping to shape open voice in the home! There are many ways to get involved, from translating or sharing voice samples to building new features—learn more about how you can contribute here. Another great way to support development is by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud, which helps fund the Open Home projects that power voice.

Home Assistant 2025.2! ❤️

In the previous release, we overhauled our backup system, and the response was overwhelming! Tons of suggestions and feature requests came in, so this release is—once again—focused on backups. Based on this community feedback, we’ve added loads of improvements, including the first integrations to store your backups in Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive!

This release also brings exciting new features to Voice! Home Assistant can now call your analog phone, and when dinner is ready, you can broadcast that message to all voice assistants in your home! But wait… there’s more!

On February 12, 2025, we’re streaming live on YouTube all about Voice: Voice - Chapter 9! 🎙 Be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you don’t miss it. 🛎

Before diving into the release notes, I also want to give a shoutout to our friends at ESPHome powering so much of the Home Assistant ecosystem, including Home Assistant Voice PE! And on February 19th, they’ll be hosting a live release party for ESPHome 2025.2! 🎉

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: It is almost Valentine’s day, did you set up some romantic scenes yet? 🌹

• Iterating on backups
  • Unencrypted backups
    • Ability to turn off encryption for specific locations
    • Downloading backups unencrypted
  • Customize the time of your backups
  • Taking backups on an advanced schedule
  • Re-introduction of the backup toggle on update
    • Backup on updating Home Assistant
    • Backup on updating add-ons
  • Improved filenames for backups
  • New locations
• Voice
  • Home Assistant will be able to call your analog phone to tell you a message
  • New Broadcast intent
  • Setting Temperature on Thermostat
  • LLMs meet calendars
  • Shared history between the default conversation agent and its LLM-based fallback
  • Model Context Protocol
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • Now available to set up from the UI
• Other noteworthy changes
• Bluetooth config panel
• Preparing our graphs for the future
• Patch releases
  • 2025.2.1 - February 7
  • 2025.2.2 - February 10
  • 2025.2.3 - February 12
  • 2025.2.4 - February 14
  • 2025.2.5 - February 21
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Iterating on backups

In the previous release, we fully revamped the entire backup experience and added many new features to make it easier to use. That release set the stage for the next iterations and opened up the ability for integrations to provide locations to store backups.

We’ve received a lot of feedback on the new backup system, which is awesome! ❤️ All the feedback helped us prioritize the most requested features, and other improvements to the backup system.

This release includes a lot of the most requested improvements and abilities.

Unencrypted backups

The new backup system came with a lot of security improvements, including encryption of backups. However, as it turns out, many users use these backups to extract and restore single files or configurations, a use case in which encryption made things more difficult. In this release we made two changes to the backup system to address this.

Ability to turn off encryption for specific locations

While our default recommendation remains to encrypt backups, as of this release, you can turn off encryption on a per location basis. This allows you to store backups on you local NAS, for example, in an unencrypted format.

There is one exception to this, which is Home Assistant Cloud. Backups stored in Home Assistant Cloud will always be encrypted, and encryption cannot be turned off. At Nabu Casa, we take your privacy and security very seriously, and we never ever want to be able to access your data.

Downloading backups unencrypted

When downloading backups from the Home Assistant interface, you will now always download the backup in an unencrypted format that can be extracted using your favorite archive tool.

This works for all backups, regardless of the encryption settings of the location in which they are stored. For instance, if you download an encrypted backup from Home Assistant Cloud through the Home Assistant interface, it will decrypt the backup on the fly while you download it.

Customize the time of your backups

The initial iteration of the backup system scheduled backups to run at 4:45 AM, but this time wasn’t ideal for everyone. Some, for example, turned off their network storage during the night, meaning the backup would fail.

This release, we added the ability to customize the time of your backups to your liking. Additionally, if you choose to make weekly backups, you can now select the days of the week you want the backup to run.

Taking backups on an advanced schedule

The above backup time changes not flexible enough for you? Well, you are in luck! In this release, we added an action (backup.create_automatic) that you can use to trigger a backup, with your preferred settings, in an automation.

This allows you to create automated backups on any schedule you like, or even add conditions and actions around it. For example, you could make an automation that triggers on a calendar, wakes up your network storage, waits till it is online, and then starts a backup.

Re-introduction of the backup toggle on update

If you run Home Assistant OS, you get updates for Home Assistant along with all your add-ons. The update dialog used to have a toggle to create a backup before updating, which was removed in the previous release.

This change was made because this feature was considered redundant when running regular automated backups. However, we’ve received a lot of feedback that many people relied on these backups to ensure they had the latest data, for instance, if they needed to roll back to a previous version of an add-on. We are re-introducing this backup on update toggle in this release, but in a smarter way. 🤓

Backup on updating Home Assistant

When updating Home Assistant, the toggle is now turned off by default and shows the last time you made a backup. This allows you to decide whether to make a new backup before updating.

If you turn the switch on, a full automated backup is created and synced to your configured locations, before the update is started.

This full sync is done to ensure you have the most recent backup available in case the update causes issues and you need to restore your system. In the rare case a Home Assistant update fatally fails and you can’t access the backup page, if you’ve configured a second backup location, you’ll be able to download it from there.

Backup on updating add-ons

Things are slightly different when updating add-ons. The toggle exists here too, and is disabled by default. However, when you enable it, only a backup of your add-on and its data is created. That way you can keep around the previous version of the add-on, so you can always roll back to it if needed.

To prevent your system from filling up with old add-on backups, we only retain one backup per add-on, automatically deleting the previous backup whenever a new one is created. Add-on backups you created manually, of course, remain untouched and will not be deleted automatically.

Improved filenames for backups

One piece of feedback we’ve seen a lot, is that the filenames created by backups can be a bit cryptic and hard to understand for humans.

This feedback was fair, as the filename was a hash and originally not designed to be human-readable. This method was not newly introduced in the last release, but it was made more apparent with the new backup system and locations.

So, in this release, we’ve improved the filenames of the backups stored on your backup locations. The filename now includes the date and time the backup was created, making it easier to understand and identify the backup you are looking for, even outside of Home Assistant.

New locations

This release also introduces new locations to store your backups. There are new integrations for Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, and backup support was added to the Synology DSM integration.

Voice

Assist, our private voice assistant, is getting a few new features in this release. If you don’t have Assist set up yet, check out our Home Assistant Voice: Preview Edition to get started.

Home Assistant will be able to call your analog phone to tell you a message

Remember our tutorial on turning an analog phone into the world’s most private voice assistant? Thanks to Jamin, we now have a way to call your analog phone from Home Assistant!

You can use assist_satellite.announce to have Home Assistant call your phone and play a message when someone picks up the phone.

If you use an LLM as the brains for your voice assistant, you can take this one step further with the new assist_satellite.start_conversation action. Instead of playing an announcement, it starts a conversation between Home Assistant and the user, with Home Assistant saying the first message. Left the garage door open for 30 minutes? No problem, let Home Assistant call and ask if they want to close it.

(Starting a conversation with the default conversation agent is a bit more work and did not make it this release).

New Broadcast intent

You can now broadcast messages to every other voice assistant in your home. Try it by saying “Broadcast it is time for dinner”. As always with new intents, support may vary depending on your language, but our language leaders are working hard on making sure it will be supported soon in your language!

Setting Temperature on Thermostat

A few releases ago we introduced an intent to get the current temperature from a climate device. As of this release, you can also set the target temperature of your thermostat by voice.

By saying “Set the temperature to 19 degrees” this will smartly target the area you are in (if you have a thermostat per area, such as thermostatic valves on your radiators) or the floor you are in (if you only have a central unit). You can also target specific devices by name if you prefer.

LLMs meet calendars

Without complex custom tooling, LLM-based conversation agents previously could not fetch events from your calendar. This release changes that. Out of the box, LLM-based agents can now retrieve today’s and this week’s events from any of your calendars. Don’t forget to expose your calendar entities to enable this functionality.

Shared history between the default conversation agent and its LLM-based fallback

In 2024.12 we introduced a lovely feature that allowed you to use our fast and local default conversation agent for most queries while still being able to fall back to a much more powerful LLM-based agent for more complex queries.

This introduced some interesting behaviors. From a user perspective, it looked like you were talking to the same assistant, whereas, in reality, nothing was shared between the two agents. This led to some less-than-optimal scenarios, such as this one:

The first command is processed locally by our default agent, but the follow-up request is processed by the LLM-based agent. Since no memory is shared, it does not understand what device you want to turn off.

Starting with this release, both agents now share the same command history, helping address this issue.

Model Context Protocol

This release adds the Model Context Protocol to Home Assistant thanks to Allen. Home Assistant can both be an MCP server and an MCP client. From the MCP website:

MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.

To give it a try yourself, check out this client demo.

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Google Drive, added by @tronikos
  Add your Google Drive as a location to store your Home Assistant backups.
• Homee, added by @Taraman17
  Integrate your Homee smart home system into Home Assistant.
• igloohome, added by @keithle888
  Monitor the battery levels of your igloo smart access device(s).
• LetPot, added by @jpelgrom
  Monitor and control your LetPot indoor garden.
• OneDrive, added by @zweckj
  Allows you to store your Home Assistant backups in your Microsoft OneDrive.
• Overseerr, added by @joostlek
  Interact with your Overseerr media requests directly from Home Assistant.
• Model Context Protocol Server, added by @allenporter
  Enables using Home Assistant to provide context for MCP LLM Client Applications. For example, you can expose your Google Tasks to-do list as a tool for Claude Desktop.
• Model Context Protocol, added by @allenporter
  Enables using MCP Servers in Home Assistant to provide additional tools to use with a conversation agent.
• Qbus, added by @thomasddn
  Allows you to integrate your Qbus Control into Home Assistant.

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. The following virtual integration have been added:

• Decorquip Dream, provided by Motionblinds added by @starkillerOG

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• A big shoutout to @NoRi2909! He has been reviewing and improving every single piece of text we show anywhere in Home Assistant. Thank you for your hard work!
• Also, @lboue! This hero keeps extending the device support for the Matter integration by adding support for more and more devices. Home Assistant is close to reaching full Matter 1.4 device support!
• @chemelli74 added support for the Shelly BLU TRV to the Shelly integration. Nice!
• The HomeWizard Energy integration now supports the HomeWizard Plug-In Battery. Awesome work @DCSBL!
• Thanks to @iprak, the Vesync integration now supports humidifiers!
• @rytilahti added vacuum support to the TP-Link Smart Home integration. Sweet!
• The Reolink integration keeps evolving, @starkillerOG added support for baby crying detection as a sensor. Nice!
• The Bang & Olufsen integration now provides entities allowing you to react to physical button presses on all Bang & Olufsen devices. Thanks @mj23000!

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.

The following integration is now available via the Home Assistant UI:

• NMBS, done by @silamon
• Filter, done by @gjohansson-ST

Other noteworthy changes

• When using the Generic thermostat, setting a temperature that matches one of the presets will automatically select that preset as active. Thanks @domingues!
• Time triggers in automations can now be offset when using datetime input helpers. Thanks @Petro31!

Bluetooth config panel

The Bluetooth integration now has its own configuration panel! 💙

The panel is accessible by going to Settings > Device & services. Find and select the Bluetooth integration, and next select Configure.

This new panel gives you access to the Bluetooth integration options and insights into the connection slot allocations. More importantly, it has an advertisement monitor!

Selecting Advertisement monitor will open a new panel, where you can see information about your Bluetooth devices, including the raw advertisement data and how they are connected to your Home Assistant instance. This includes which Bluetooth proxy it connects through!

Preparing our graphs for the future

This release includes a major overhaul of every graph we display and show in Home Assistant. We have entirely replaced the software library that renders these graphs in the frontend.

You can most definitely tell things have changed, but everything still looks very similar. The latter was our goal for now, as we wanted the existing experience to be familiar.

However, this change is a preparation for the future. We have many plans and ideas for our graphs, and this change was a necessary step to make those plans possible.

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.2 in February. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday.

2025.2.1 - February 7

• Fix hassio test using wrong fixture (@emontnemery - #137516)
• Change Electric Kiwi authentication (@mikey0000 - #135231)
• Update govee-ble to 0.42.1 (@cdce8p - #137371)
• Bump holidays to 0.66 (@gjohansson-ST - #137449)
• Bump aiohttp-asyncmdnsresolver to 0.1.0 (@bdraco - #137492)
• Bump aiohttp to 3.11.12 (@bdraco - #137494)
• Bump govee-ble to 0.43.0 to fix compat with new H5179 firmware (@bdraco - #137508)
• Bump habiticalib to v0.3.5 (@tr4nt0r - #137510)
• Fix Mill issue, where no sensors were shown (@Danielhiversen - #137521)
• Don’t overwrite setup state in async_set_domains_to_be_loaded (@emontnemery - #137547)
• Use separate metadata files for onedrive (@zweckj - #137549)
• Fix sending polls to Telegram threads (@jwhb - #137553)
• Skip building wheels for electrickiwi-api (@cdce8p - #137556)
• Add excluded domains to broadcast intent (@synesthesiam - #137566)
• Revert “Add PaddleSwitchPico (Pico Paddle Remote) device trigger to Lutron Caseta” (@bdraco - #137571)
• Fix Overseerr webhook configuration JSON (@denniseffing - #137572)
• Do not rely on pyserial for port scanning with the CM5 + ZHA (@puddly - #137585)
• Bump eheimdigital to 1.0.6 (@autinerd - #137587)
• Bump pyfireservicerota to 0.0.46 (@cyberjunky - #137589)
• Bump reolink-aio to 0.11.10 (@starkillerOG - #137591)
• Allow to omit the payload attribute to MQTT publish action to allow an empty payload to be sent by default (@jbouwh - #137595)
• Handle previously migrated HEOS device identifier (@andrewsayre - #137596)
• Bump aioshelly to version 12.4.1 (@bieniu - #137598)
• Bump electrickiwi-api to 0.9.13 (@mikey0000 - #137601)
• Bump ZHA to 0.0.48 (@TheJulianJES - #137610)
• Bump Electrickiwi-api to 0.9.14 (@mikey0000 - #137614)
• Update google-nest-sdm to 7.1.3 (@allenporter - #137625)
• Don’t use the current temperature from Shelly BLU TRV as a state for External Temperature number entity (@bieniu - #137658)
• Fix LG webOS TV turn off when device is already off (@thecode - #137675)

2025.2.2 - February 10

• LaCrosse View new endpoint (@IceBotYT - #137284)
• Convert coinbase account amounts as floats to properly add them together (@natekspencer - #137588)
• Bump ohmepy to 1.2.9 (@dan-r - #137695)
• Bump onedrive_personal_sdk to 0.0.9 (@zweckj - #137729)
• Limit habitica ConfigEntrySelect to integration domain (@cdce8p - #137767)
• Limit nordpool ConfigEntrySelect to integration domain (@cdce8p - #137768)
• Limit transmission ConfigEntrySelect to integration domain (@cdce8p - #137769)
• Fix tplink child updates taking up to 60s (@bdraco - #137782)
• Call backup listener during setup in Google Drive (@tronikos - #137789)
• Use the external URL set in Settings > System > Network if my is disabled as redirect URL for Google Drive instructions (@tronikos - #137791)
• Fix manufacturer_id matching for 0 (@patman15 - #137802)
• Fix DAB radio in Onkyo (@arturpragacz - #137852)
• Fix LG webOS TV fails to setup when device is off (@thecode - #137870)
• Fix heos migration (@balloob - #137887)
• Bump pydrawise to 2025.2.0 (@dknowles2 - #137961)
• Bump aioshelly to version 12.4.2 (@bieniu - #137986)
• Prevent crash if telegram message failed and did not generate an ID (@CloCkWeRX - #137989)
• Bump habiticalib to v0.3.7 (@tr4nt0r - #137993)
• Refresh the nest authentication token on integration start before invoking the pub/sub subsciber (@allenporter - #138003)
• Use resumable uploads in Google Drive (@tronikos - #138010)
• Bump py-synologydsm-api to 2.6.2 (@mib1185 - #138060)
• Handle generic agent exceptions when getting and deleting backups (@abmantis - #138145)
• Bump onedrive-personal-sdk to 0.0.10 (@zweckj - #138186)
• Keep one backup per backup agent when executing retention policy (@emontnemery - #138189)
• Improve inexogy logging when failed to update (@jpbede - #138210)
• Bump pyheos to v1.0.2 (@andrewsayre - #138224)
• Update frontend to 20250210.0 (@bramkragten - #138227)
• Bump lacrosse-view to 1.1.1 (@IceBotYT - #137282)

2025.2.3 - February 12

• Bump hass-nabucasa from 0.88.1 to 0.89.0 (@ludeeus - #137321)
• Move cloud backup upload/download handlers to lib (@ludeeus - #137416)
• Handle non-retryable errors when uploading cloud backup (@ludeeus - #137517)
• Add missing thermostat state EMERGENCY_HEAT to econet (@jdanders - #137623)
• Fix broken issue creation in econet (@jdanders - #137773)
• Fix version extraction for APsystems (@alfwro13 - #138023)
• Refresh nest access token before before building subscriber Credentials (@allenporter - #138259)
• Fix BackupManager.async_delete_backup (@emontnemery - #138286)
• Fix next authentication token error handling (@allenporter - #138299)
• Bump pyenphase to 1.25.1 (@catsmanac - #138327)
• Bump sentry-sdk to 1.45.1 (@edenhaus - #138349)
• Bump zeroconf to 0.144.1 (@bdraco - #138353)
• Bump cryptography to 44.0.1 (@edenhaus - #138371)
• Fix tplink iot strip sensor refresh (@sdb9696 - #138375)
• Bump deebot-client to 12.1.0 (@edenhaus - #138382)
• Bump hass-nabucasa from 0.89.0 to 0.90.0 (@emontnemery - #138387)
• Update cloud backup agent to use calculate_b64md5 from lib (@emontnemery - #138391)

2025.2.4 - February 14

• Bump python-kasa to 0.10.2 (@sdb9696 - #138381)
• Bump hass-nabucasa from 0.90.0 to 0.91.0 (@ludeeus - #138441)
• Bump aiowebostv to 0.6.2 (@thecode - #138488)
• Bump ZHA to 0.0.49 to fix Tuya TRV issues (@TheJulianJES - #138492)
• Bump pyseventeentrack to 1.0.2 (@shaiu - #138506)
• Bump hass-nabucasa from 0.91.0 to 0.92.0 (@emontnemery - #138510)
• Bump py-synologydsm-api to 2.6.3 (@mib1185 - #138516)
• Update frontend to 20250214.0 (@bramkragten - #138521)

2025.2.5 - February 21

• Adjust Tuya Water Detector to support 1 as an alarm state (@petacz - #135933)
• Fix bug in set_preset_mode_with_end_datetime (wrong typo of frost_guard) (@pectum83 - #138402)
• Bump pyhive-integration to 1.0.2 (@KJonline - #138569)
• Bump tesla-fleet-api to v0.9.10 (@Bre77 - #138575)
• Bump pysmarty2 to 0.10.2 (@lucab-91 - #138625)
• Rename “returned” state to “alert” (@shaiu - #138676)
• Bump pyvesync for vesync (@cdnninja - #138681)
• Opower: Fix unavailable “start date” and “end date” sensors (@SaswatPadhi - #138694)
• Correct backup filename on delete or download of cloud backup (@emontnemery - #138704)
• Correct invalid automatic backup settings when loading from store (@emontnemery - #138716)
• Bump airgradient to 0.9.2 (@joostlek - #138725)
• Clean up translations for mocked integrations inbetween tests (@emontnemery - #138732)
• Bump pyrympro from 0.0.8 to 0.0.9 (@nivstein - #138753)
• Don’t allow setting backup retention to 0 days or copies (@emontnemery - #138771)
• Fix TV input source option for Sonos Arc Ultra (@PeteRager - #138778)
• Add assistant filter to expose entities list command (@synesthesiam - #138817)
• Fix playback for encrypted Reolink files (@starkillerOG - #138852)
• Correct backup date when reading a backup created by supervisor (@emontnemery - #138860)
• Bump pyfritzhome to 0.6.15 (@mib1185 - #138879)
• Validate hassio backup settings (@emontnemery - #138880)
• Catch zeep fault as well on GetSystemDateAndTime call. (@DmitryKuzmenko - #138916)
• Fix Reolink callback id collision (@starkillerOG - #138918)
• Fix handling of min/max temperature presets in AVM Fritz!SmartHome (@mib1185 - #138954)
• Bump pyprosegur to 0.0.13 (@dgomes - #138960)
• Bump reolink-aio to 0.12.0 (@starkillerOG - #138985)
• Bump deebot-client to 12.2.0 (@edenhaus - #138986)
• Omit unknown hue effects (@joostlek - #138992)
• Update frontend to 20250221.0 (@bramkragten - #139006)

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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

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

• Energy by distance units
• Relocate dhcp/ssdp/usb/zeroconf ServiceInfo models

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 2025.2

Home Assistant is a powerful tool that can save you time and money by automating your home. Pretty important things around the home, from heating to an automatic fish feeder, need to depend on it. However, as your setup grows more complex, maintaining it—what we call “digital housekeeping”—can become a time-consuming task. Backups are a critical part of this maintenance, yet they’re often overlooked, especially by new users, often until it is too late when disaster strikes.

To make backups effortless, we’ve introduced new automated and off-site backup features in the latest release of Home Assistant. These improvements will make it easier than ever to safeguard your setup. As we step into the New Year, we would encourage you to adopt a simple yet crucial resolution: regularly back up your data. With our new tools, it takes just five minutes to set up and provides lasting peace of mind.

Learn more about our backups below, or get started now by updating and visiting the backups page.

What’s in a backup?

Backups are essential for a reliable smart home. They protect your system from hardware failures, natural disasters, and cyberattacks, allowing you to quickly restore operations. A solid backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of your data
• 2 stored on different media
• 1 kept off-site

While this may seem excessive, consider a scenario like a lightning strike: both your Home Assistant system and any local storage, like network-attached storage (NAS), could be destroyed. That’s why an off-site backup is non-negotiable for true resilience, and a comprehensive backup strategy should include:

• Regular and frequent backups of critical data
• Following the 3-2-1 rule for redundancy
• Encrypting backups to protect against theft and corruption
• Testing backups to ensure they are functional
• Defining how long backups should be retained

To support these best practices, we have worked hard to introduce Automatic Backups and seamless integration with off-site backup location providers, such as Home Assistant Cloud. These updates, part of our 2024 roadmap, make it easier than ever to provide peace of mind to our users, by implementing a robust backup strategy, and keep your smart home running smoothly.

Backups have never been this easy

Home Assistant backups are incredibly good, backing up every setting and add-on, making restores feel a bit like magic. It even works across different CPU architectures! Up until recently setting up a 3-2-1 backup strategy in Home Assistant was not entirely straightforward. This changes with Home Assistant 2025.1, where we’re elevating our backup experience with three new important features.

• Automatic encrypted backups - You can now schedule automatic backups every night or once a week, ensuring you always have a recent backup at hand.
• Automatic cleanup - No longer worry about backups overrunning your disk space, as you can now set the maximum number of backups that should be stored.
• Backup locations - We have added a new system for integrations to provide backup locations (also known as backup agents), allowing you to sync backups to both local or off-site storage. It’s launching with support for network shares and Home Assistant Cloud (included at no additional cost to subscribers), with more locations to follow.

Get started with our Backup Wizard

The new automatic backup feature in Home Assistant 2025.1 comes with a new easy to use backup wizard. With a couple of clicks, you can backup your Home Assistant system on a regular schedule and easily choose the places where backups are stored. New users will be prompted with a wizard to make sure they set up automatic encrypted backups. Selecting the recommended settings ensures that a backup is made every night, that three backups are kept, and that they are uploaded to all available locations.

Backup locations

At launch, only a few backup locations will be available, but we’ve made it easy for developers to integrate more, so expect a lot of options to follow. As part of this renewed focus on smart home resilience set out in our roadmap, cloud backup has been added to Home Assistant Cloud, which will be available day one to all subscribers for no additional cost. It will only store the latest backup, which must be under 5GB (you’ll be notified to repair it if it is too large to upload). If you lose your other backups, you can always go to your Cloud account page and download the latest backup.

New Home Assistant features like this supercharged backup capability is only possible with funding from our Home Assistant Cloud subscribers. Adding backup to the subscription at no additional cost, was the least we could do to thank them for their continued support.

Secure by default

Backups contain all Home Assistant data, including all the keys to every integrated device in your smart home and the history of how you live your life. This data is very important to keep secure. With automatic backups and the 3-2-1 approach we are promoting to users to store their backups off-site. This is why all automatic backups are fully encrypted.

When a user configures automatic backups, they will be presented with the encryption key and the option to download an emergency kit. The emergency kit contains all the important information, including a link to the instructions on how to use it to restore a backup. If you were to ever delete your emergency kit, it is available to re-download in the backup configuration page.

Apply 3-2-1 to your backups

Check out the above video tutorial or read our docs to learn more about setting up automatic and off-site backups.

Conclusion

Too often, people just starting their smart home journey move forward a little too fast and make a mistake that causes some downtime. This impacts the household’s confidence, as something that should be making their lives easier is actually seen as unreliable. Avoid this early pitfall and build a resilient smart home with 3-2-1 backups.

Home Assistant 2025.1! 🥂

Happy New Year! The whole Home Assistant project wishes you and your loved ones a fantastic and healthy 2025! ❤️ Let’s make this year even better than the last!

We are all super excited to kick off the new year with an absolute massive release! 🎆

This release brings a complete overhaul of the backup system in Home Assistant, which has been in the works for months! And I’m not just talking about some user interface changes—no, we are talking about a complete overhaul from front to back!

Automated backups, encrypted Home Assistant Cloud backup storage, retention policies, configuration wizards, and even the ability for integrations to offer backup storage locations! 🤯

But that is not all! We also had the Month of “What the Heck?!” in December, which resulted in a lot of quality-of-life improvements raised by the community that month!

There is so much to unwrap in this release, seriously, let’s just dive in!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

• Overhaul of the backup system
  • Automated backups 🤖
  • Triggering an off-schedule automated backup 👆
  • Home Assistant Cloud backups 😎
  • Backup locations are extendable by design 🧩
  • Encrypted backups by default 🔒
  • Restoring backups available to all installation methods 🤗
  • Backup retention 🗑
  • Setting up backups for the first time 🚀
  • 3…2…1… Backups 🎊
• Month of “What the Heck?!”
  • Setting categories and labels when creating automations and scripts
  • Quickly navigate to a device
  • Zoom & Pan for charts
  • Controlling the default exposure of new entities to Assist
  • More “What the Heck?!” improvements
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • Now available to set up from the UI
  • Farewell to the following
• Other noteworthy changes
• Dashboard background settings
• Media player volume feature for Tile card
• Patch releases
  • 2025.1.1 - January 7
  • 2025.1.2 - January 9
  • 2025.1.3 - January 20
  • 2025.1.4 - January 24
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Overhaul of the backup system

Let’s talk about backups. Let’s be honest: they’re one of the most important yet often overlooked tasks. But when disaster strikes, like a hardware failure, having a reliable backup can save the day. Wouldn’t you love to be back up and running after disaster strikes?

While Home Assistant’s previous backup system has proven to be solid and reliable over the years, it didn’t exactly make following best practices—like regular backups, encryption, and off-site storage—easy. Many of you had to rely on custom add-ons, automations, or blueprints for backups to fill the gaps.

That changes with this release! 🎉

We’ve completely reworked the Home Assistant backup experience to help you set up a solid backup strategy, using best practices in just a few clicks; giving you peace of mind when it comes to your backups.

No worries, if you are using any custom solution for backups, they will continue to work today. Even with everything new, we’ve made sure to keep everything backward compatible.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the new backup system!

Automated backups 🤖

Yes, you read that right—Home Assistant now supports automated backups!

Using a schedule, backups will be created on a regular basis without you having to lift a finger. This ensures you always have a recent backup available, without having to worry about it.

When you navigate to your backups in the settings menu, you will be greeted with a new overview page that shows you exactly when your last backup took place and when the next one is scheduled. Instant peace of mind!

Automated backups are taking place at 4:45 AM. So, while everyone in your home is sleeping, Home Assistant makes sure your data is safe and sound. Backing up at this early hour also means Home Assistant is done with its internal database maintenance, ensuring your backup is as compact as possible.

If something ever goes wrong during the automated scheduled backup process, Home Assistant will notify you through the repair center, ensuring you are aware of it and can take action.

Triggering an off-schedule automated backup 👆

Automated backups on a schedule are great, but sometimes, you might want to trigger a backup right now! Maybe you are about to make big changes or upgrade a whole bunch of things during an evening of tinkering.

No worries! You can now trigger an off-schedule automated backup from the backup page at any time. This will immediately create a backup with the same configuration as your scheduled automated backups.

The ability to trigger an on-demand automated backup is excellent, as it covers all your backup settings in a single click. However, the ability to create manual backups also still exists. This allows you to create a very specific backup with the exact contents you want to have in it.

Home Assistant Cloud backups 😎

Are you a Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa subscriber? Then you’re in for a treat! You can now automatically store your latest, fully encrypted, backup in your Home Assistant Cloud account.

This feature provides 5GB of storage at no extra cost, offering fully encrypted off-site protection for your data! 🎁

The backup can be downloaded from Home Assistant itself, but also from the Home Assistant Cloud account page @ Nabu Casa in case you need it. This way, you can always access your latest backup, even in case your Home Assistant hardware completely fails.

Backup locations are extendable by design 🧩

So, automated backups can be stored on your local disk and in Home Assistant Cloud, but what if you want to store your backups somewhere else?

Choice is an important aspect of Home Assistant; we want to make everything as flexible as possible without vendor lock-in. Therefore, the backup system is designed to be extendable.

This means integrations can offer new storage locations—such as NAS devices, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, or other storage providers—in the future.

Currently, this feature is brand new ✨, so no integrations offer additional locations yet. However, we expect to see a few more integrations that provide backup locations in the next release.

This extensibility ensures you can store your backups where you want them, giving you the flexibility and choice to choose the storage solution you prefer and trust.

Encrypted backups by default 🔒

With the addition of Home Assistant Cloud as an off-site backup location, and the potential for integrations to offer even more (off-site) backup locations, security has become more important than ever. Your backups not only contain the access credentials to your smart home devices but also the history of your home, and no one should be able to access information that sensitive! Ever!

That is why all backups are now AES-128 encrypted by default. To prioritize your backups’ security we replaced the previous optional password with a mandatory encryption key.

When you set up your backups for the first time, an encryption key will be generated for you. Make sure to store this key in a safe place, as you will need it to restore your backups. To make this easier, you can download the key as part of an emergency kit during setup—or anytime later from the backup settings page. Keep it safe! 🔑

Restoring backups available to all installation methods 🤗

More good news—restoring backups is now supported across all installation methods! 🎉

Previously, only Home Assistant OS installations could restore backups. But with this release, this feature is now available for all installation methods! No matter how you run Home Assistant, even if you use our containers in a Docker environment, you can now restore your Home Assistant backups.

This also means you can restore backups from local storage, Home Assistant Cloud, or any future backup locations added through integrations.

As a matter of fact, all backup features, including everything we release today, will be available regardless of the installation method you are using. We want everyone to have a solid backup strategy.

Backup retention 🗑

Our previous backup system made solid backups, which was good, but if you didn’t clean them up manually, eventually, you’d annoyingly run out of disk space. 😬

So! Backup retention is now a thing! You can now configure how many backups you want to keep, and Home Assistant will handle the rest.

This cleanup will happen automatically after each backup. If you create a backup manually for whatever reason, those will remain untouched, giving you full control over special cases and workflows.

Setting up backups for the first time 🚀

Getting started with the new backup system is quick and easy!

The first time you open the backup settings after upgrading, you will be greeted by a setup wizard that will guide you through setting up your backups step-by-step.

The wizard will help you set up your encryption key, configure your backup frequency, and set up your backup retention policy. And when it is ready, it will immediately kick off your first backup!

All set! One less thing to worry about 🎉

3…2…1… Backups 🎊

We are super excited about this new backup system! As we enter the new year, we encourage you to get serious about your backups. A good New Year’s resolution, maybe? 😉

So, stop what you are doing right now and set up your backups! Go ahead and set up that 3-2-1 backup strategy. Not sure what that is?

You can read all about it in our 3…2…1… Backup blog post.

Month of “What the Heck?!”

December’s Month of “What the Heck?!” was an absolute blast! 🎉

A big thank you to everyone who contributed by sharing their “What the Heck?!” moments and ideas for improving Home Assistant. Your input is incredibly valuable and helps shape our roadmap and priorities moving forward.

Quite a bunch of shared “What the Heck?!” moments have been addressed in this release already 🚀 —and we’re not stopping there! Expect to see even more improvements inspired by your feedback in upcoming releases.

Setting categories and labels when creating automations and scripts

For the first WTH item that has been resolved, we have @jpbede to thank! And this one is also one of the higher-voted ones, so it is a good one! Andrew Jackson wrote:

“WTH can you not add categories, labels etc when creating an automation”

Yeah, that is a good WTH! Whenever you create a new automation or script, you probably want to organize it right away and not have to go back to the settings. FIXED! 🎉

When you create a new automation or script, and also when renaming it, you can now set the description, category, labels, and areas right away! 🏷️ Nice!

Quickly navigate to a device

You might be aware that you can bring up our quick navigation bar anywhere in Home Assistant by pressing the c key on your keyboard to navigate various places and the e key to search and navigate to any entity. However…

“WTH is there no quick bar for devices?”

Well, that is a good question that Andreas Brett raised! There is indeed no such thing for devices. @jpbede to the rescue! You can now navigate to any device using the quick bar by pressing the d key on your keyboard.

Zoom & Pan for charts

KNXBroker raised the following WTH topic:

“WTH lets upgrade History Graphs”

You are right! The history graphs in Home Assistant are basic but functional! Nevertheless, we can do better! 🚀

One of the bigger items in that WTH topic was the ability to zoom and pan… Thanks to @MindFreeze, you can now zoom and pan in any graph in Home Assistant! 📈

Zoom and drag any graph in Home Assistant, by holding ctrl (or command on mac) and scrolling your mouse wheel!

Hold the control key (or command on macOS) and scroll to zoom in and out using your mouse. You can also click and drag to pan around the zoomed graph.

In addition to this change, @MindFreeze enabled small micro-animation for the history graphs, making them look more alive and less static.

Controlling the default exposure of new entities to Assist

mathd made the following point in a Month of “What the Heck?!” topic:

“WTH Are all new entities exposed to Assist by default?”

We hear you! Thanks to @jpbede, you can now control the default exposure of new entities to Assist. You can now toggle this on or off in the Home Assistant Voice Assistant settings.

More “What the Heck?!” improvements

Many smaller improvements originate from the Month of “What the Heck?!” in this release. Here are some of the other noteworthy ones:

“WTH there is no hotkey for Assist”**

Well, thanks to @jpbede, you can now press the a key on your keyboard anywhere in Home Assistant to summon Assist! 🎙️ Nice!

“WTH doesn’t HA ask if I want to save automations?”

Whoa! That is a good one! Thanks to @jpbede, Home Assistant will now ask if you want to save your automation before leaving the editor if there are unsaved changes. 🤖

“WTH Is in Energy Dashboard the individual devices not able to reorder”

Thanks for that one yormedia! Honestly, this one has been raised in previous editions of the Month of “What the Heck?!” a few times. Reason enough for @karwosts to pick this up and make it happen! You can now reorder them in the setting for categorization purposes. 🔡

“WTH Can’t I filter labels within a table filter?”

Good question. If you have a lot of labels, scrolling through the list of labels in the filter option can be a bit cumbersome. Thanks to @silamon, you can now search and filter through the labels in the filter option! 🔎

WTH sentence trigger doesn’t contain any context

Great idea! Thanks to @balloob, the full conversation input is now available to sentence triggers! 🗣️ This was actually the first WTH item to be resolved in this edition! 😎

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Cookidoo, added by @miaucl
  Interact with your shopping lists of Cookidoo the official Thermomix recipe platform.
• EHEIM Digital, added by @autinerd
  Control your EHEIM Digital aquarium devices with Home Assistant.
• Ituran, added by @shmuelzon
  Retrieve and use information from your Ituran-equipped vehicle.
• Ohme, added by @dan-r
  Get sensor information from your Ohme smart EV charger.
• Peblar, added by @frenck
  Control and monitor the charging sessions of your Peblar EV Charger.
• Powerfox, added by @klaasnicolaas
  Gather data from your Poweropti devices reading electricity, water, gas, and heat.
• Slide Local, added by @dontinelli
  Integrate your Slide cover device directly with Home Assistant using a local API.
• Watergate, added by @adam-the-hero
  Integrate your Watergate Sonic Local with Home Assistant.

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• The TP-Link Smart Home now has support for cameras! Nice work @sdb9696!
• @RaHehl added UniFi Protect AI Port support to the UniFi Protect integration. Awesome!
• The Music Assistant integration now has support for actions with response values from your Music Assistant. Thanks, @marcelveldt!
• The Cambridge Audio integration now supports media browsing! Thanks, @noahhusby!
• @dotav added the ability to control the combustion power of your Palazzetti pellet stove. Nice!
• The SwitchBot Bluetooth integration now supports the SwitchBot Water Leak Detector and relay switch. Good work, @luc-ass and @greyeee!
• @davidrapan has been working on the Starlink integration, adding sensors reporting power, energy, and data usage. Nice!

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.

The following integration is now available via the Home Assistant UI:

• Niko Home Control, done by @VandeurenGlenn

Farewell to the following

The following integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] are also no longer available as of this release:

• DTE Energy Bridge has been removed after being deprecated. The integration was no longer functional.
• Simulated has been previously deprecated and is now removed.
• Stookalert has been removed. The upstream data is no longer updated. The Stookwijzer integration is a good alternative to get the same information.

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes:

• When viewing data tables and using ctrl+f in your browser to search, the search input will now be focused automatically. As native browser searches will not work on data tables. Thanks @jpbede!
• @marcinbauer85 adjusted the “Add card” dialog, to automatically focus on the search field when you add a card, so you can start typing to search right away! Nice touch!
• Images uploaded through Home Assistant (for example, as background or as a user profile picture) are now browsable in the media browser. Thanks @karwosts!
• The unit of measurement is now shown next to the numeric slider in the more-info dialog of number entities. Thanks, @abmantis!
• Home Assistant now supports mWh as a unit of measurement for energy sensors and mW for electrical potential power sensors. Thanks @agners!
• @wendevlin added settings and category overflow actions to the automation and script editor (the three-dotted menu in the top right corner), making it easier to access those straight from the editor. Nice!
• The logbook card supports picking a target for things it should show events for. You can now pick based on entities, devices, areas, floors, and labels! Thanks, @silamon!

Dashboard background settings

A few releases ago, we made adding a background image to your dashboard easier. This release, @silamon takes it a step further by adding a lot of settings to customize how the background image is displayed.

This includes support for tiled backgrounds, transparency, size settings, alignment, and allowing the background to scroll with the page or stay fixed.

Nice! Thanks, @silamon!

Media player volume feature for Tile card

This is a super nice addition from @simon-zumbrunnen! The Tile card now supports a media player volume slider feature. This feature allows you to control the volume of a media player directly from the Tile card. 🔉 Nice work Simon!

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.1 in January. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday.

2025.1.1 - January 7

• Matter Battery replacement icon (@lboue - #134460)
• Small fix to allow playing of expandable favorites on Squeezebox (@peteS-UK - #134572)
• Bump bleak-esphome to 2.0.0 (@bdraco - #134580)
• Bump uiprotect to version 7.2.0 (@RaHehl - #134587)
• Mention case-sensitivity in tplink credentials prompt (@rytilahti - #134606)
• Fix Flick Electric authentication (@ZephireNZ - #134611)
• Fix hive color tunable light (@epenet - #134628)
• Set logging in manifest for Cookidoo (@miaucl - #134645)
• Remove call to remove slide (@joostlek - #134647)
• Update twentemilieu to 2.2.1 (@frenck - #134651)
• Fix Reolink playback of recodings (@starkillerOG - #134652)
• Update peblar to 0.3.3 (@frenck - #134658)
• Bump cookidoo-api library to 0.11.1 of for Cookidoo (@miaucl - #134661)
• Update demetriek to 1.1.1 (@frenck - #134663)
• Cookidoo exotic domains (@miaucl - #134676)
• Iterate over a copy of the list of programs at Home Connect select setup entry (@Diegorro98 - #134684)
• Change from host to ip in zeroconf discovery for slide_local (@dontinelli - #134709)
• Bump ZHA to 0.0.45 (@TheJulianJES - #134726)
• Bump openwebifpy to 4.3.1 (@autinerd - #134746)
• Fix swapped letter order in “°F” and “°C” temperature units (@NoRi2909 - #134750)
• Bumb python-homewizard-energy to 7.0.1 (@DCSBL - #134753)
• Register base device entry during coordinator setup in AVM Fritz!Tools integration (@mib1185 - #134764)
• Bump pysuezV2 to 2.0.1 (@jb101010-2 - #134769)
• Fix missing sentence-casing etc. in several strings (@NoRi2909 - #134775)
• Raise ImportError in python_script (@gjohansson-ST - #134792)
• Replace “id” with “ID” for consistency across HA (@NoRi2909 - #134798)
• Fix a few typos or grammar issues in asus_wrt (@NoRi2909 - #134813)
• Bump uiprotect to version 7.4.1 (@RaHehl - #134829)
• Bump habluetooth to 3.7.0 (@bdraco - #134833)
• Fix how function arguments are passed on actions at Home Connect (@Diegorro98 - #134845)
• Bump aiolifx-themes to update colors (@Djelibeybi - #134846)
• Update Roborock config flow message when an account is already configured (@allenporter - #134854)
• Log upload BackupAgentError (@ludeeus - #134865)
• Log cloud backup upload response status (@ludeeus - #134871)
• Bump solax to 3.2.3 (@squishykid - #134876)
• Add extra failure exceptions during roborock setup (@Lash-L - #134889)
• Use uppercase for “ID” and sentence-case for “name” / “icon” (@NoRi2909 - #134890)
• Bump python-kasa to 0.9.1 (@sdb9696 - #134893)
• Add bring_api to loggers in Bring integration (@tr4nt0r - #134897)
• Fix wrong power limit decimal place in IronOS (@tr4nt0r - #134902)
• Update frontend to 20250106.0 (@bramkragten - #134905)
• Bump powerfox to v1.1.0 (@klaasnicolaas - #134730)
• Bump powerfox to v1.2.0 (@klaasnicolaas - #134908)
• Bump holidays to 0.64 (@gjohansson-ST - #134922)
• Revert “Remove deprecated supported features warning in LightEntity” (@arturpragacz - #134927)
• Revert “Remove deprecated supported features warning in …” (multiple) (@frenck - #134933)

2025.1.2 - January 9

• Fix Météo-France setup in non French cities (because of failed next rain sensor) (@Quentame - #134782)
• Increase cloud backup download timeout (@ludeeus - #134961)
• Fix ZHA “referencing a non existing via_device” warning (@puddly - #135008)
• Catch errors in automation (instead of raise unexpected error) in Overkiz (@iMicknl - #135026)
• Fix channel retrieval for Reolink DUO V1 connected to a NVR (@starkillerOG - #135035)
• Bump aioautomower to 2025.1.0 (@Thomas55555 - #135039)
• Bump cookidoo-api to 0.12.2 (@miaucl - #135045)
• Implement upload retry logic in CloudBackupAgent (@ludeeus - #135062)
• Add jitter to backup start time to avoid thundering herd (@emontnemery - #135065)
• Bump pysuezV2 to 2.0.3 (@jb101010-2 - #135080)
• Fix Flick Electric Pricing (@ZephireNZ - #135154)
• Update frontend to 20250109.0 (@bramkragten - #135235)

2025.1.3 - January 20

• Fix DiscoveryFlowHandler when discovery_function returns bool (@kgraefe - #133563)
• Aprilaire - Fix humidifier showing when it is not available (@chamberlain2007 - #133984)
• Gracefully handle webhook unsubscription if error occurs while contacting Withings (@dcmeglio - #134271)
• Image entity key error when camera is ignored in EZVIZ (@RenierM26 - #134343)
• Bump pyaussiebb to 0.1.5 (@Bre77 - #134943)
• Fix Watergate Power supply mode description and MQTT/Wifi uptimes (@adam-the-hero - #135085)
• Fix missing comma in ollama MODEL_NAMES (@epenet - #135262)
• Bump Freebox to 1.2.2 (@Quentame - #135313)
• Actually use translated entity names in Lametric (@joostlek - #135381)
• Fix descriptions of send_message action of Bring! integration (@NoRi2909 - #135446)
• Bump switchbot-api to 2.3.1 (@SeraphicRav - #135451)
• Fix incorrect cast in HitachiAirToWaterHeatingZone in Overkiz (@iMicknl - #135468)
• Replace pyhiveapi with pyhive-integration (@KJonline - #135482)
• Fix referenced objects in script sequences (@arturpragacz - #135499)
• Use STT/TTS languages for LLM fallback (@synesthesiam - #135533)
• Bump demetriek to 1.2.0 (@joostlek - #135580)
• Use device supplied ranges in LaMetric (@joostlek - #135590)
• Bump elkm1-lib to 2.2.11 (@gwww - #135616)
• Fix mqtt number state validation (@jbouwh - #135621)
• Add reauthentication to SmartThings (@joostlek - #135673)
• Handle invalid HS color values in HomeKit Bridge (@bdraco - #135739)
• Update aioairzone to v0.9.9 (@Noltari - #135866)
• Remove device_class from NFC and fingerprint event descriptions (@RaHehl - #135867)
• Prevent HomeKit from going unavailable when min/max is reversed (@bdraco - #135892)
• Bump onvif-zeep-async to 3.2.2 (@bdraco - #135898)
• Round brightness in Niko Home Control (@VandeurenGlenn - #135920)
• Update NHC lib to v0.3.4 (@VandeurenGlenn - #135923)
• Update knx-frontend to 2025.1.18.164225 (@farmio - #135941)
• Bump aiooui to 0.1.8 (@bdraco - #135945)
• Bump aiooui to 0.1.9 (@bdraco - #135956)
• Fix switchbot cloud library logger (@joostlek - #135987)
• Correct type for off delay in rfxtrx (@elupus - #135994)
• Handle invalid datetime in onvif (@bdraco - #136014)
• Bump aioraven to 0.7.1 (@cottsay - #136017)
• Bump onvif-zeep-async to 3.2.3 (@bdraco - #136022)
• Bump yt-dlp to 2025.01.15 (@joostlek - #136072)
• Bump deebot-client to 11.0.0 (@edenhaus - #136073)
• Always include SSL folder in backups (@emontnemery - #136080)

2025.1.4 - January 24

• Update Hydrawise maximum watering duration to meet the app limits (@mattdoran - #136050)
• Bump holidays to 0.65 (@gjohansson-ST - #136122)
• Handle width and height placeholders in the thumbnail URL (@Makrit - #136227)
• Fix slave id equal to 0 (@crug80 - #136263)
• Handle LinkPlay devices with no mac (@silamon - #136272)
• Fallback to None for literal “Blank” serial number for APCUPSD integration (@yuxincs - #136297)
• Update peblar to v0.4.0 (@frenck - #136329)
• Avoid keyerror on incomplete api data in myuplink (@astrandb - #136333)
• Update frontend to 20250109.1 (@piitaya - #136339)
• Update frontend to 20250109.2 (@piitaya - #136348)
• Bump aiowithings to 3.1.5 (@joostlek - #136350)
• Bump powerfox to v1.2.1 (@klaasnicolaas - #136366)

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

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

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

• Changed name of WaterHeaterEntityDescription
• Climate entity now supports independent horizontal swing
• Moving to Pydantic v2
• New vacuum state property
• Use Kelvin as the preferred color temperature unit
• New area device class

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 2025.1

TL;DR: Check out the product page

We all deserve a voice assistant that doesn’t harvest our data and arbitrarily limit features. In the same way Home Assistant made private and local home automation a viable option, we believe the same can, and must be done for voice assistants.

Since we began developing our open-source voice assistant for Home Assistant, one key element has been missing - great hardware that’s simple to set up and use. Hardware that hears you, gives you clear feedback, and seamlessly fits into the home. Affordable and high-quality voice hardware will let more people join in on its development and allow anyone to preview the future of voice assistants today. Setting a standard for the next several years to base our development around.

We’re launching Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to help accelerate our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them. This is inevitable: They’ll focus their efforts on monetizing voice, while our community will be focused on improving open and private voice. We’ll support the languages big tech ignores and provide a real choice in how you run voice in your home.

The era of open, private voice assistants begins now, and we’d love for you to be part of it.

Table of contents

• Introducing Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition
  • Why Preview Edition
  • Built for Home Assistant
  • Advanced audio processing
  • Bringing choice to voice
  • Fully open and customizable
  • Community-driven
• Conclusion
  • See what voice can do today

Introducing Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition

Our main goal with Voice Preview Edition was to make the best hardware to get started with Assist, Home Assistant’s built-in voice assistant. If you’re already using other third-party hardware to run Assist, this will be a big upgrade. We prioritized its ability to hear commands, giving it an industry-leading dedicated audio processor and dual microphones - I’m always blown away by how well it picks up my voice around the room.

Next, we ensured it would blend into the home, giving it a sleek but unobtrusive design. That’s not to say it doesn’t have flair. When you get your hands on Voice Preview Edition the first thing you’ll notice is its premium-feeling injection-molded shell, which is semi-transparent, just like your favorite ‘90s tech. The LED ring is also really eye-catching, and you can customize it to your heart’s content from full gamer RGB to subtle glow.

It’s hard to convey how nice the rotary dial is to use; its subtle clicks paired with LED animations are hard not to play with. Most importantly, the dial lets anyone in your home intuitively adjust the volume. The same can be said for the multipurpose button and mute switch (which physically cuts power to the microphone for ultimate privacy). We knew for it to work best, it needed to be out in the open, and let’s just say that Home Approval Factor was very front of mind when designing it.

We also worked hard to keep the price affordable and comparable to other voice assistant hardware at just $59 (that’s the recommended MSRP, and pricing will vary by retailer). This isn’t a preorder, it’s available now!

Why Preview Edition

For some, our voice assistant is all they need; they just want to say a couple of commands, set timers, manage their shopping list, and control their most used devices. For others, we understand they want to ask their voice assistant to make whale sounds or to tell them how tall Taylor Swift is - this voice assistant doesn’t entirely do those things (yet). We think there is still more we can do before this is ready for every home, and until then, we’ll be selling this Preview of the future of voice assistants. We’ve built the best hardware on the market, and set a new standard for the coming years, allowing us to focus our development as we prepare our voice assistant for every home. Taking back our privacy isn’t for everyone - it’s a journey - and we want as many people as possible to join us early and make it better.

Built for Home Assistant

Many other voice assistants work with Home Assistant, but this one was built for Home Assistant. Unlike other voice hardware that can work with Assist, this doesn’t require flashing firmware or any assembly. You plug it into power, and it is seamlessly discovered by Home Assistant. A wizard instantly starts helping you set up your voice assistant, but critically, if you haven’t used voice before, it will quickly guide you through what you need to get the best experience.

Get up and running with Voice Preview Edition in minutes with our new wizard

This is not a DIY product. We’ve worked to make the experience as smooth as possible, with easy and fast updates and settings you can manage from the Home Assistant UI.

Advanced audio processing

If you have been following our work on voice, you know we’ve tried a lot of different voice assistant hardware. Most available Assist-capable hardware is bad at its most important job - hearing your voice and then providing audiovisual feedback. That was really what drove us to build Voice Preview Edition.

Voice Preview Editions mics and audio processors effortlessly hear commands through loud music it is playing

Our Assist software could only do so much with substandard audio, and its functionality is massively improved with clear audio. The dual microphones combined with the XMOS audio processing chip are what makes it so capable. Together, they allow Voice Preview Edition to have echo cancellation, stationary noise removal, and auto gain control, which all adds up to clearer audio. This combined with an ESP32-S3 with 8 MB of octal PSRAM - one of the fastest ESP and RAM combinations available - makes for an incredibly responsive device. This is the best Assist hardware you can buy today, and it will continue to give a great experience as Assist’s feature set expands in the years to come.

Bringing choice to voice

Assist can do something almost no other voice assistant can achieve - it can run without the internet 🤯. You can speak to your Voice Preview Edition, and those commands can be processed completely within the walls of your home. At the time of writing this, there are some pretty big caveats, specifically that you need to speak a supported language and have pretty powerful hardware to run it (we recommend a Home Assistant system running on an Intel N100 or better).

Diagram of cloud vs local speech processing

If you use low-powered Home Assistant hardware, there is an easy and affordable internet-based solution; Home Assistant Cloud. This privacy-focused service allows you to offload your speech-to-text and text-to-speech processing, all while being very responsive and keeping your energy bill low. Speech-to-text is the harder of the two to run locally, and our cloud processing is almost always more accurate for more languages (visit our language support checker here).

Our goal is for Assist to run easily, affordably, and fully locally for all languages. As someone who has seen the rapid development of this technology over the past several years, I’m optimistic that this will happen, but until then, many languages have a good range of choices that provide strong privacy.

Fully open and customizable

We are sharing the design files if you want to 3D print a new case... these ones were inevitable

We’re not just launching a new product, we’re open sourcing all of it. We built this for the Home Assistant community. Our community doesn’t want a single voice assistant, they want the one that works for them – they want choice. Creating a voice assistant is hard, and until now, parts of the solution were locked behind expensive licenses and proprietary software. With Voice Preview Edition being open source, we hope to bootstrap an ecosystem of voice assistants.

We tried to make every aspect of Voice Preview Edition customizable, which is actually pretty easy when you’re working hand-in-hand with ESPHome and Home Assistant. It works great with the stock settings, but if you’re so inclined, you can customize the Assist software, ESP32 firmware, and XMOS firmware.

Connecting Grove sensors allows you to use your Voice Preview Edition as a more traditional ESPHome device - here is it acting as a voice assistant and air monitor.

We also made the hardware easy to modify, inside and out. For instance, the included speaker is for alerts and voice prompts, but if you want to use it as a media player, connect a speaker to the included 3.5mm headphone jack and control it with software like Music Assistant. The included DAC is very clean and capable of streaming lossless audio. It can also be used as a very capable ESP32 device. On the bottom of the device is a Grove port (concealed under a cover that can be permanently removed), which allows you to connect a large ecosystem of sensors and accessories.

We’ve also made it quite painless to open, with easy-to-access screws and no clips. We even included exposed pads on the circuit board to make modifying it more straightforward. We’re providing all the 3D files so you can print your own components… even cartoon character-inspired ones. We’re not here to dictate what you can and can’t do with your device, and we tried our best to stay out of your way.

Community-driven

The beauty of Home Assistant and ESPHome is that you are never alone when fixing an issue or adding a feature. We made this device so the community could start working more closely together on voice; we even considered calling it the Community edition. Ultimately, it is the community driving forward voice - either by taking part in its development or supporting its development by buying official hardware or Home Assistant Cloud. So much has already been done for voice, and I can’t wait to see the advancements we make together.

Conclusion

Home Assistant values champions choice. Today, we’re providing one of the best choices for voice hardware. One that is truly private and totally open. I’m so proud of the team for building such a great working and feeling piece of hardware - this is a really big leap for voice hardware. I expect it to be the hardware benchmark for open-voice projects for years to come. I would also like to thank our language leaders who are expanding the reach of this project, our testers of this Preview Edition, and anyone who has joined in our voice work over the past years.

The hardware really is only half the picture, and it’s the software that really brings this all together. Mike Hansen has just written the Voice Chapter 8 blog to accompany this launch, and this explains all the things we’ve built over the past two years to make Assist work in the home today. He also highlights everything that Voice Preview Edition was built to help accelerate development.

See what voice can do today

As you have probably already read, we launched our Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition today. The culmination of the past several years of open-source software progress on Home Assistant’s home-grown voice assistant, Assist. A sizable group of dedicated developers has been working together on adding and honing its many features, and if it’s been a while since you tried Assist, you should use this launch as a chance to jump back in and see the progress we’ve made.

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition has been launched to build on this work, continuing the momentum we’ve already built and accelerating our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them. We had an early production run of Voice Preview Edition (a preview preview 😉), and we tried to get them in the hands of as many of our language leaders and voice developers as possible - and we’re already seeing the fruits of their efforts with language support improving over the past month alone!

I’d like to highlight in this voice chapter all the things you can do with Assist today. I also want to give the state of our development, what the limitations are, and where your support can be best applied.

Table of Contents

• Assist in the home today
  • Origins of Assist
  • Commands
  • Timers
  • Exposing devices and Aliases
  • Room context
  • Wake words
• Speech Processing
  • Language support
  • Text-to-speech
  • Speech-to-text
  • AI and Assist
• Conclusion

Assist in the home today

Origins of Assist

Early versions of Assist via chat - things have come a long way

Voice control for Home Assistant goes back further than most people assume, with some of the groundwork we use today being added as far back as 2017. The major turning point came when we refocused our efforts and declared 2023 the Year of the Voice. This was an effort to focus development and find areas where our community could make the most impact. During the Year of the Voice Assist was added to voice, intents were improved, languages added, wake words were created, and we established great local and cloud options for running voice. Shortly after Year of the Voice many more features were added, including integrated AI, timers, and even better wake words. Year of the Voice got the ball rolling, and Voice Preview Edition will continue its momentum.

Commands

Assist is the underlying technology that allows Home Assistant to turn commands (“turn on the light”) into Actions (light.turn_on). Commands, or as we call them intents, allow you to control pretty much every aspect of your smart home, including on, off, play, pause, next, open, close, and more. We also have intents that give you helpful information like what’s the time, weather, temperature, and so on. Lastly, there are a bunch of other useful miscellaneous things, like adding items to a shopping list and setting timers. If you’re interested, there is a full list here.

Timers

When we asked our community timers were a top-requested ability. You can not only set a timer, pause, increase, decrease or cancel it, but you can also set commands to trigger after a set amount of time, for example, “turn off the TV in 15 minutes”. You can also just say “Stop” without a wake word, to silence the timer’s alarm. On our Voice Preview Edition, when you set a timer the LED ring counts down the last seconds and flashes when it’s done.

Exposing devices and Aliases

This sets us apart from other voice assistants: we allow you to expose and effectively hide devices from your voice assistant. For example, you could choose not to expose a door lock but instead just expose the sensor that knows if the door is closed. It puts you in the driver’s seat on what voice can do in your home. We also introduced aliases to allow you to give devices multiple names, allowing you to speak more naturally with Assist.

Room context

If you tell your Assist hardware what room it is in and ensure other devices are organized by room, you can give commands like “turn off the lights”, and without specifying anything, it will turn off the lights in the room you are in. This feature also works with media players (play/pause/next) and timers.

Wake words

Our community is donating small amounts of time to improve wake words with our tool.

Wake Words are the unique phrases that initiate a voice assistant to listen and start processing a command. Wake words originally had to be processed on Home Assistant via an add-on like openWakeWord, meaning the Assist hardware needed to continuously stream audio to Home Assistant. Shortly after Year of the Voice microWakeWord was released, which brought wake word processing on-device for faster responses. It is improving fast thanks to our community using our fast and easy tool to donate samples of their voice. There is a growing list of wake words, and the on-device options include “Okay Nabu” (default and most reliable), “Hey Jarvis”, and “Hey Mycroft”. Both of these wake word engines were built by the Home Assistant community and are open source, giving the world two great free and open wake word engines!

Speech Processing

The Assist pipeline in all its glory

Assist can’t understand spoken words and needs something to take that audio and turn it into text - all this together is called an Assist pipeline. This speech processing is really CPU intensive, so it can’t happen on the Voice Assistant Hardware, and sometimes your Home Assistant system can’t even handle it. One important step we made was adding speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities to Home Assistant Cloud, which allows low-powered Home Assistant hardware to offload speech processing to the cloud. Home Assistant Cloud doesn’t store or use this data to train on - clouds don’t get any more private than ours. It is also the most accurate and power-efficient way to process speech. We’ve put considerable effort into local speech processing, building the add-ons and a new protocol they use to speak to Home Assistant, but they are very reliant on language support from the community.

Language support

See if your language is supported with our checker.

Assist aims to support more languages than other voice assistants, and this has been a massive undertaking for our community - We need more help. The first step for language support is getting the commands (intents) right, and we have over 25 major languages that are ready to use today. Our wake words are also getting better at understanding different accents thanks to our Wake Word Collective tool.

Text-to-speech

We built our own text-to-speech system, Piper, and it now supports over 30 languages. It’s a fast, local neural network-powered text-to-speech system that sounds great and can run on low-powered hardware (it’s optimized for Pi4!). It was built with the voices of our community, and if you don’t see your native tongue, add your voice!

Speech-to-text

There is one area that holds back the rest of our language support more than others, and that’s local speech-to-text. Building a full speech-to-text model needs big compute resources and terabytes of samples, which is currently outside our reach. We use Whisper for local speech-to-text processing, an open-source project from OpenAI, and we’re grateful it exists. For some languages, it works great and doesn’t require a lot of system resources to run well, but for others, you need a pretty beefy system to get acceptable results. In our opinion, only about 15 languages are ready to be run locally on reasonable hardware (an Intel N100 or better) - that’s why before you begin dreaming up your perfect all-local setup, we recommend checking language support.

We’re always looking for new solutions for low-powered hardware, and are now building another tool that uses much less complex sentence recognition. This could even run on a Raspberry Pi 4, but it would only be able to identify predefined sentences, so if you go off script you may need to call in an AI to help Assist understand your needs. Our language leaders are hard at work putting together the needed translations, but if you want to learn more visit Rhasspy Speech.

In general, even when your language is supported, you’ll almost always get better results from Home Assistant Cloud. Use the free trial to see what works best for you. Also, you can use both, we know someone using an automation to switch the Assist pipeline to an all local setup when their internet is down.

AI and Assist

Our default local conversation agent mixed with AI is great for natural language and speed

Another aspect where we beat the competition hands down is the integration of AI into our voice assistant. You can choose from some of the biggest cloud AI providers like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude (paid accounts required). You can also run it locally via Ollama if you have a modern graphics processor with enough VRAM, allowing you to build the most capable offline voice setup around.

Our intents (Assist’s built-in sentences) are getting better at understanding most commands, but AI processes commands in natural language, meaning if you get the device’s name ever so slightly off, it can still figure things out. It also provides the ability to ask outside the built-in intents. For instance, if you tell it “It’s a bit cold in here”, it may raise the temperature on your thermostat, but it could forgo any home control and just tell you to put on a jacket - results are not yet consistent. More useful is its ability to take multiple sensors and provide context. For instance, you could ask it for an air quality report, and it could review the CO2 levels and tell you to open a window it observes is shut. All this is experimental, and having an AI control your home is not for everyone, but what’s important is that you have the choice.

Conclusion

So many new innovations and improvements for Assist have happened in the past couple of months, and this speaks to the power of having good hardware to build our software on. Voice Preview Edition is the best open voice hardware available today, and even with it only in the hands of a couple of hundred people today, it’s making a noticeable difference. Whether that’s writing code, improving language support, making blueprints, or even just reporting bugs. The momentum we will build having this in the hands of thousands will be game-changing - it’s why we’ve declared that the era of open voice assistants has arrived.

In the comments sections, we always have a couple of people saying, “but I don’t use voice, what about improving (this or that)”. The good news is that improving Assist and Home Assistant’s other features are already happening in tandem (check out our roadmap for the complete picture of our priorities). In the end, only a fraction of our development goes towards voice, and our budget is what Amazon’s voice team probably spends on pizza parties 😆. A great side effect is the problems we’re solving with voice are benefiting other parts of Home Assistant, for example, our integration of AI was driven by voice.

We really think voice is an integral part of a well-rounded smart home ecosystem. It’s especially important for improving the accessibility of home control to all members of the household. There needs to be real options in the space, most importantly ones that give you full control and a real choice on privacy.

Home Assistant Voice Preview is available at retailers today,

As Home Assistant continues to grow and evolve, so does our commitment to making it more inclusive, accessible, and aligned with the diverse needs of our community. To that end, we’re launching an annual survey—and we hope you’ll participate!

A big part of building our roadmap going forward was focusing more on research, which led the team to bring me (Annika) in as a Senior User Experience Researcher. We could keep assuming our community’s wants and needs, but we’d rather base our decisions on data-driven insights 😉. With this survey, we aim to better understand not just how you use Home Assistant, but also who you are as a person, a smart home user, and a member of our community. This knowledge will help us:

• Tailor our future work to address the needs of our community.
• Identify trends and shifts in the smart home landscape over time.
• Ensure Home Assistant and its ecosystem reflect the values and priorities of those who use it.

We understand that some of the questions we’re asking touch on sensitive topics. Rest assured, your responses are completely anonymous, and all questions are optional. If you’re ever uncomfortable, you can skip a question—but for the results to be recorded, you must hit the submit button at the end of the survey. This survey isn’t short; we recommend setting aside around 20 minutes to complete it. Fill out the survey here or read more about what we’re trying to learn below.

~Annika

What we’re hoping to learn

We’re curious about how you began your smart home journey and what drives your decisions today in your home. From the types of devices you use to how your household interacts with your smart home. We want to learn who is using Home Assistant, not just the primary user, but also those living in your smart home. These insights allow us to understand the varied experiences and expertise within the community. For example, knowing your professional background helps us identify areas where your day-to-day knowledge intersects with smart home technologies. We are also asking about neurodiversity, which can help us understand how our community processes and interacts with information. By learning about these differences, we can make our communication and platform design more inclusive. Again, we can understand if you prefer not to share this information.

One area we’re trying to understand better is how you personally resonate with the values of the Open Home. We believe in privacy, sustainability, and choice—but how important are these values to you?

Your data

First and foremost, the survey is entirely anonymous, and you can skip any question you don’t want to answer. For sensitive questions (e.g., gender), we provide options like “prefer not to say” or open text fields.

Once collected, the data will be anonymized and aggregated to ensure your privacy. Because we cannot identify individual responses, certain data rights (like deletion requests) won’t be applicable after submission. Please note around halfway through the survey there is a partial submit point, once you click continue the previous answers will be recorded. The data will be stored and handled according to GDPR standards. For more details, see our User Research Agreement.

How you can help

This isn’t a short survey and should take around 20 minutes - don’t hesitate to return later to complete it. For the results to be recorded, you must progress past the partial submission point or hit the submit button at the end of the survey. While responding to the survey, be aware that there is no right or wrong answer. It is about you as a person, your experience, opinions, and feelings. Don’t overthink your responses, but stay with the answers that come to your mind intuitively. The more detail, the better - your insights will help shape our future directions. Also, share it with friends, family, or anyone who uses Home Assistant.

Fill out the Survey here

The survey opens on Monday, December 16, and closes on Monday, January 20. Once we’ve analyzed the data, we’ll share the results and insights with the community. By participating, you’re helping us build a better Home Assistant - one that grows with its users and stays true to its values. Thanks for your support!