A smart home should truly be smart. It automates lights using presence detection, tracks tasks like mail pickup, and reduces screen time. No switches or apps required. Just seamless automation that th...

Amazon is killing its “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” privacy feature on March 28 as the company aims to bolster Alexa+, its new subscription assistant.

Mit der Voice Preview Edition gibt es ein Sprachassistent-Gerät für Home Assistant, das eine lokale Sprachverarbeitung ganz ohne Cloud bietet. Wie gut das in der Praxis funktioniert, zeigt der Test. |...

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 our3…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: 1-Wire The unit of measurement has been removed from 1-Wire counters because `count` is not a unit 😁 (@jrieger - #132076) (documentation) Denon HEOS Grouping a HEOS media player will now raise an exception if one of the members is not a valid HEOS player. Previously unknown or invalid members would be silently dropped. (@andrewsayre - #132213) (documentation) devolo Home Control The integration with devolo Home Control has been updated to remove the option to set the mydevolo URL. This option was used to integrate with the devolo Home Control Cloud for development purposes only. This option is no longer available. (@Shutgun - #132821) (documentation) FXCOM RFXtrx The unit of measurement has been removed from FXCOM RFXtrx counters because `count` is not a unit 😁 (@jrieger - #133108) (documentation) HomeWizard Energy The unit of measurement for the “Water usage” sensor has been updated from `l/min` to `L/min`. This change standardizes the unit to improve consistency across Home Assistant. Any automations, scripts, or templates that rely on the old unit may need to be adjusted. Long-term statistics will remain intact, but repair issues will be created to ensure the data is updated with the new unit. (@DCSBL - #132261) (documentation) LIFX The options `color_temp` and `kelvin` are no longer valid arguments for LIFX actions. Please use `color_temp_kelvin` instead. (@epenet - #132730) (documentation) Tesla Fleet The included OAuth application credentials have been removed, as Tesla no longer supports Open Source application registrations and is moving to a pay-per-use model. Read more about this announcement in this blog post. (@Bre77 - #132431) (documentation) UniFi Network The states of “Device State” sensors have been standardized to match Home Assistant core rules and be translatable. This affects the following UniFi sensor states: * `Connected`, which now became `connected` * `Pending`, which now became `pending` * `Firmware Mismatch`, which now became `firmware_mismatch` * `Upgrading`, which now became `upgrading` * `Provisioning`, which now became `provisioning` * `Heartbeat Missed`, which now became `heartbeat_missed` * `Adopting`, which now became `adopting` * `Deleting`, which now became `deleting` * `Inform Error`, which now became `inform_error` * `Adoption Failed`, which now became `adoption_failed` * `Isolated`, which now became `isolated` * `Unknown`, which now became `unknown` If you used those states directly in your automations, scripts, or templates; you will need to adjust those to match these changes. (@bieniu - #131921) (documentation) Zabbix The integration now uses the official Zabbix Python API. Because of this, the minimum supported Zabbix version is now 5.0. This change drops support for Zabbix 4 and before. (@kruton - #131674) (documentation) 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

**Welcome to Voice chapter 9 🎉 part of ourlong-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 2024.12! 🎄 Holidays are coming, and it is time for the last release of the year! 🎉 **2024** has been a crazy year for Home Assistant. Not just in terms of features like drag-and-drop dashboards, organization capabilities like labels, and the countless improvements to our voice efforts. But also the founding of the Open Home Foundation, and even more in the growth of our lovely community as we’ve risen up to become the #1 open source project on GitHub! ❤️ However, the year ain’t over yet! This month, we want to learn about all your _“What the heck?!”_ moments with Home Assistant. Tell us about any little annoyances, bugs, ideas, or suggestions. You can read all about it in the WTH announcement blog, or join the conversation on our WTH forums! Honestly, **the biggest announcement of the year has yet to come though** … 🤫 I’m pretty sure it is voice hardware related. 😉 So make sure you aren’t missing the live stream on 19 December! 📺 You will not be disappointed! 🎁 Before you check out everything in this release, I just want to close this year with a big thank you to every single person in our community, which includes you! **Thank you for using Home Assistant!** ❤️ Happy holidays! And for the last time in 2024: Enjoy the release! ../Frenck * Improved scene editor experience * Voice * Let your voice assistant fall back to an LLM-based agent * Language leaders are accelerating the pace * A faster voice experience * Revised Integration Quality Scale * Integrations * New integrations * Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations * Other noteworthy changes * Translations for units of measurement * We’ve upgraded to Python 3.13 * Patch releases * 2024.12.1 - December 6 * 2024.12.2 - December 10 * 2024.12.3 - December 13 * 2024.12.4 - December 17 * 2024.12.5 - December 20 * Need help? Join the community! * Backward-incompatible changes * All changes ## Improved scene editor experience ScenesScenes capture the states you want certain entities to be. For example, a scene can specify that light A should be turned on and light B should be bright red. [Learn more] are a great way to set the mood in your home. They allow you to capture the state of your devices at a specific moment and restore it later, using a button on your dashboard, an automation, or even a voice command. One of the common frustrations with editing scenes in Home Assistant is that it would immediately activate and apply the scene if you opened the scene editor. Not the best experience if you are doing some midnight tinkering and accidentally activate a scene that turns on all the lights in the house, waking up everyone. 😅 @karwosts & @marcinbauer85 to the rescue! 🦸‍♂️ As of this release, the scene editor has two modes. A **review mode** and an **edit mode**. The “review mode” is how your scene will open, and it will show you the scene as it is currently set up, but it will not apply it. You can then switch to the “edit mode”; only then will the scene activate, allowing you to adjust the actual scenery and snapshot it again once you are happy with the changes. Additionally, if you prefer YAMLYAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is used to store and transmit data in a structured format. In Home Assistant, YAML is used for configuration, for example in the `configuration.yaml` or `automations.yaml` files. [Learn more], you can edit scenes directly from the scene editor by selecting **“Edit in YAML”** from the three-dotted overflow menu in the top right corner. ## Voice It has almost been two years since we started our journey into building our very own open source voice assistants, with the goal of letting users control Home Assistant in their own language. Today, we are getting even closer to the finish line. Not just with the features that ship in this release, but you might have heard about our voice hardware that is coming soon… With some help from Santa 🎅 and his elves, we have prepared a product launch YouTube live stream on 19 December 2024, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PT / 21:00 CET! Curious? Be sure to join the live stream, hit like 👍, subscribe to our channel, and the little bell 🔔 to get notified when we go live! You really don’t want to miss this one! But before we get there, let’s dive into the features that ship in this release! ### Let your voice assistant fall back to an LLM-based agent Exactly 6 months ago, we bridged the gap between our default conversation agent and the wonderful (and scary) world of LLMs. We allowed you to experiment and let an LLM-based conversation agent control your home instead of relying on our built-in sentences. This choice was an interesting first step. LLMs are generally much better at interpreting natural language and more knowledgeable about the world than our default agent. However, they are often slow and/or expensive. And let’s face it: Even if the demos are cool, 90% of the commands we say in our homes are simple: _“Turn this on”_ or _“Turn that off”_. Today, we’re finally allowing users to **mix** these worlds. Starting from this release, you can set up a voice assistant that targets our fast, community-driven conversation agent first and only falls back to an LLM-based agent if no matches are found. This allows you to mix the pros of both worlds with almost none of the cons. Specific known commands will be processed locally and extremely fast, and the power of an LLM will only be used for more complex queries that Home Assistant does not natively understand. ### Language leaders are accelerating the pace It is no secret: our voice hardware will be revealed on 19 December 2024. Language leaders have already got their hands on the device, and are working extremely hard to polish support for their language. The number of contributions to our intents repository (where we store the supported sentences) skyrocketed during the last month, which we all truly appreciate. More and more languages are becoming usable or even complete! You can follow the progress here. We won’t list them all, but rest assured, someone is likely working hard to ensure your native language works seamlessly, so you can use it comfortably at home. ### A faster voice experience Our default conversation agent was built from the ground up to match a sentence to its underlying intention extremely fast and on cheap hardware. Release after release, we added more use cases and sentences to Home Assistant, and our sentence-matching logic became slower and slower. In some languages, a non-matching sentence could take more than 15 seconds to process! This release adds a lot of love to this matching logic; we completely reengineered the way we match sentences. On top of that, language leaders spent some time reducing the complexity of their sentences. Some languages saw a 99% reduction in the number of possible combinations! The results speak for themselves: ## Revised Integration Quality Scale The Integration Quality Scale (IQS) is a way we classify the “quality” of an integration. It gives users an idea of what to expect from an integration. You might have noticed our IQS indicator listed on each integration documentation page. The scale was initially introduced in 2018 and aimed more at the technical side and code of an integration back then. Over the years, it didn’t really evolve with the rest of Home Assistant and the general expectations of our community. It was time for a change! Over the last few months, we have worked with the community to revise and improve the scale. Involving not just our community developers but also documentation writers, user experience designers, and anyone interested in the community. As a result, the new Integration Quality Scale is not just focused on the code but even more on the overall user experience. It is now a more holistic view of the integration, and we hope it will help everyone make better decisions about what to use in their homes. We now have a total of 4 scaled tiers: * **🥉Bronze**: The new minimum set of requirements we’ve set for new integrations. * **🥈Silver**: Ensuring reliability and robustness of integrations. * **🥇Gold**: Ensuring a gold standard user experience, including documentation. * **🏆Platinum**: The epitome of quality, supreme code quality, and optimal performance. We also have four additional (non-scaled) special tiers: * **❓No score**: For integrations that are not yet scored against the new scale. * **🏠Internal** For integrations Home Assistant itself uses, like the automation engine. * **💾Legacy** For older integrations that can’t be set up through the UI. * **📦Custom** For custom integrations, as we can’t score those. You can read all about these tiers, what they have been designed for, and a summary of their characteristics on our dedicated Integration Quality Scale page. We sincerely hope this new scale will not just help our users, but also our community developers to understand what is expected by providing a clear path to improving their integrations. To help with that, we have now extensively documented every rule and requirement for each tier in our developer documentation. ## 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: * **Acaia** , added by @zweckj Adds support for Acaia coffee scales to Home Assistant. * **Music Assistant** , added by @jozefKruszynski The integration for Music Assistant is making its way into Home Assistant! 🎉 * **NASweb** , added by @nasWebio Brings in support for the NASweb automation system to Home Assistant. * **Nord Pool** , added by @gjohansson-ST Pulls in latest energy prices from the Nord Pool energy market as sensors. * **Sky Remote** , added by @dunnmj Control your Sky box using automations or from your Home Assistant dashboards. ### 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 UniFi Protect integration now has support for fingerprint and NFC events. You can even automate on the specific fingerprint or NFC scanned! Awesome, @RaHehl! * The TP-Link integration now supports the H200 hubs and adds more energy-monitoring sensors for Tapo devices. It also exposes new entities like a motion sensor switch, a child lock switch for thermostats, and the last water leak alert timestamp. Thanks to @sdb9696, @rytilahti, and @ryenitcher! * @starKillerOG added selector entities for bitrate, framerate, and vehicle tone to the Reolink integration. Additionally, a tilt position sensor for PTZ cameras has been added. Thanks! * @fwestenberg updated the Stookwijzer integration, with some new sensors, right on time for the winter season. Nice! * The Habitica integration now provides actions for quest handling, scoring habits, and rewards. It also adds calendars for your to-do and daily reminders. Nice, @tr4nt0r! * The eQ-3 Bluetooth Smart integration now provides several helpful switches and sensors (like away mode, boost, battery). Thanks, @EuleMitKeule! * @YogevBokobza added Switcher Lights support to the Switcher integration. Thanks! ## Other noteworthy changes There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release: * @jpbede added a download snapshot button to the camera entity information dialog. Super nice! Thanks! * The UI now displays durations using a timer format (like 03:26:00) in natural language (3h 26min). Thanks @piitaya! * Support for new units of measurement has been added: * Units for area sizes (and conversions between metric and US). Thanks @mikey0000! * @jschlyter has added support for MW, GW, TW, GWh, and TWh. Nice! * µV has been added as a unit of electric potential. Thanks @tr4nt0r! * Lastly, mL/s has been added as a unit of volume flow rate. Thanks @zweckj! * If you are editing an automation using YAML via our UI and you make a mistake… you will now actually see the parsing error message in the UI. This is really helpful! Thanks, @karwosts! ## Translations for units of measurement Over the last few years, we have been working hard to make every little bit of Home Assistant accessible for everyone by providing translations for every part of the system. 🌐 However, we still have some edge cases, where we are not able to provide translations for everything. One of those edge cases is the units of measurement. 📏 Although units do not need translation (like `°C` or `kWh`) in most cases, many sensors in a home might use specific and non-standardized units. For example, a sensor that measures the number of “people” in a home or one that tells you how many “movies” are in your collection. So, suppose you now have a sensor with a custom measurement unit, like the amount of “movies” in your collection. In that case, integrations can now provide translations for those units. 🎉 Several integrations have already added translations for their units, including Jellyfin, Lyrion Music Server, Transmission, Pi-hole, QBitTorrent, NextDNS, Mastodon, and Mealie! ## We’ve upgraded to Python 3.13 This release comes packaged with Python 3.13! 🐍 Wondering what that means? Python is the programming language that powers Home Assistant behind the scenes. Why does it matter? Every new Python release brings improvements that we can tap into—better performance, fewer bugs, and a smoother developer experience for our contributors. Plus, Python 3.13 offers a speed boost to Home Assistant overall—what’s not to love? 🚀 Running Home Assistant OS or using the Home Assistant Container? No sweat—we’ve got you covered. The upgrade to Python 3.13 is handled automatically. Just update Home Assistant as usual, and you’re good to go. Easy, right? 😎 ## Patch releases We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2024.12 in December. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release every Friday. ### 2024.12.1 - December 6 * Bump elmax-api to 0.0.6.3 (@albertogeniola - #131876) * Fix deprecated call to mimetypes.guess_type in CachingStaticResource (@bdraco - #132299) * Bump tesla-fleet-api to 0.8.5 (@Bre77 - #132339) * Add missing UnitOfPower to sensor (@robinostlund - #132352) * Removes references to croniter from utility_meter (@dgomes - #132364) * Bump upb-lib to 0.5.9 (@gwww - #132411) * Bump pydeako to 0.6.0 (@Balake - #132432) * Bump aiohttp to 3.11.10 (@bdraco - #132441) * Bump aioesphomeapi to 28.0.0 (@bdraco - #132447) * Update exception handling for python3.13 for getpass.getuser() (@allenporter - #132449) * Bump hass-nabucasa from 0.85.0 to 0.86.0 (@ludeeus - #132456) * Fix nordpool dont have previous or next price (@gjohansson-ST - #132457) * Bump deebot-client to 9.2.0 (@edenhaus - #132467) * Point to the Ecovacs issue in the library for unspoorted devices (@edenhaus - #132470) * Bump tplink python-kasa dependency to 0.8.1 (@sdb9696 - #132472) * Bump samsungtvws to 2.7.2 (@epenet - #132474) * Update frontend to 20241127.5 (@bramkragten - #132475) * Update frontend to 20241127.6 (@bramkragten - #132494) * Fix google tasks due date timezone handling (@allenporter - #132498) ### 2024.12.2 - December 10 * Enable additional entities on myUplink model SMO20 (@astrandb - #131688) * Bump pydrawise to 2024.12.0 (@dknowles2 - #132015) * Fix API change for AC not supporting floats in SwitchBot Cloud (@SeraphicRav - #132231) * Update pyrisco to 0.6.5 (@agmckaybro - #132493) * Fix PyTado dependency (@erwindouna - #132510) * Bump pycups to 2.0.4 (@bdraco - #132514) * Update debugpy to 1.8.8 (@frenck - #132519) * bump total_connect_client to 2023.12 (@austinmroczek - #132531) * Bump aiounifi to v81 to fix partitioned cookies on python 3.13 (@Kane610 - #132540) * Update twentemilieu to 2.2.0 (@frenck - #132554) * Bump yalexs-ble to 2.5.2 (@bdraco - #132560) * Bump plugwise to v1.6.1 (@bouwew - #131950) * Bump plugwise to v1.6.2 and adapt (@bouwew - #132608) * Fix config flow in Husqvarna Automower (@Thomas55555 - #132615) * Bump ZHA dependencies (@puddly - #132630) * Bump plugwise to v1.6.3 (@bouwew - #132673) * Bump yt-dlp to 2024.12.06 (@joostlek - #132684) * Revert “Bump pyezviz to 0.2.2.3” (@srescio - #132715) * Bump intents to 2024.12.9 (@synesthesiam - #132726) * Update frontend to 20241127.7 (@bramkragten - #132729) * Bump reolink-aio to 0.11.5 (@starkillerOG - #132757) * Catch Hydrawise authorization errors in the correct place (@dknowles2 - #132727) * Pass an application identifier to the Hydrawise API (@dknowles2 - #132779) * Bump deebot-client to 9.3.0 (@edenhaus - #132834) * Bump aioacaia to 0.1.11 (@zweckj - #132838) ### 2024.12.3 - December 13 * Bump python-linkplay to v0.1.1 (@silamon - #132091) * Bump pydaikin to 2.13.8 (@weltall - #132759) * Fix pipeline conversation language (@synesthesiam - #132896) * fix AndroidTV logging when disconnected (@chemelli74 - #132919) * Guard Vodafone Station updates against bad data (@chemelli74 - #132921) * Bump led-ble to 1.1.1 (@bdraco - #132977) * Change warning to debug for VAD timeout (@synesthesiam - #132987) * Fix LaMetric config flow for cloud import path (@frenck - #133039) * Update frontend to 20241127.8 (@bramkragten - #133066) * Bump pysuezV2 to 1.3.5 (@jb101010-2 - #133076) * Bugfix to use evohome’s new hostname (@zxdavb - #133085) * Bump py-aosmith to 1.0.12 (@bdr99 - #133100) * Bump deebot-client to 9.4.0 (@edenhaus - #133114) * Bump aiowithings to 3.1.4 (@joostlek - #133117) ### 2024.12.4 - December 17 * Simplify recorder RecorderRunsManager (@emontnemery - #131785) * Fix fibaro climate hvac mode (@rappenze - #132508) * Bump yt-dlp to 2024.12.13 (@joostlek - #133129) * Fix strptime in python_script (@gjohansson-ST - #133159) * Bump yalexs-ble to 2.5.4 (@bdraco - #133172) * Bump starlink-grpc-core to 1.2.1 to fix missing ping (@MrConorAE - #133183) * Bump aiolifx to 1.1.2 and add new HomeKit product prefixes (@Djelibeybi - #133191) * Revert “Simplify recorder RecorderRunsManager” (@emontnemery - #133201) * Revert “Improve recorder history queries (#131702)” (@emontnemery - #133203) * Bump incomfort-client to v0.6.4 (@jbouwh - #133205) * Bump yalexs-ble to 2.5.5 (@bdraco - #133229) * Set code_arm_required to False for homekit_controller (@bdraco - #133284) * Allow load_verify_locations with only cadata passed (@mib1185 - #133299) * Bump `imgw-pib` to version 1.0.7 (@bieniu - #133364) * Fix fan setpoints for flexit_bacnet (@lellky - #133388) * Bump holidays to 0.63 (@gjohansson-ST - #133391) ### 2024.12.5 - December 20 * Bump `nice-go` to 1.0.0 (@IceBotYT - #133185) * Add support for Nice G.O. HAE00080 wall station (@IceBotYT - #133186) * Bugfix: also schedule time based integration when source is 0 (@ronweikamp - #133438) * Ensure screenlogic retries if the protocol adapter is still booting (@bdraco - #133444) * Bump Freebox to 1.2.1 (@Quentame - #133455) * Bump pyOverkiz to 1.15.3 (@iMicknl - #133458) * Don’t raise Overkiz user flow unique_id check (@iMicknl - #133471) * Update Roborock to 2.8.1 (@Lash-L - #133492) * Update fjäråskupan to 2.3.1 (@elupus - #133493) * Update fjäråskupan to 2.3.2 (@elupus - #133499) * Bump gardena_bluetooth to 1.5.0 (@elupus - #133502) * Bump aiohttp to 3.11.11 (@bdraco - #133530) * Handle null value for elapsed time in Music Assistant (@marcelveldt - #133597) * Fix Twinkly raise on progress (@joostlek - #133601) * Handle mqtt.WebsocketConnectionError when connecting to the MQTT broker (@bdraco - #133610) ## 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: Brother Printer The unit of measurement for pages changed from `p` to `pages`. This could potentially break use cases if it was used in templates where a state with a unit is used, such as `states('sensor.pages', with_unit=True)`. (@bieniu - #131275) (documentation) Ecovacs Ecovacs devices not recognized by the library will no longer use the fallback vacuum. Instead, the device will not be added to Home Assistant, and a warning log will created. (@edenhaus - #131525) (documentation) Glances The previously deprecated Glances v2 API has been removed. Upgrade to v3 or higher to continue using the integration. (@gjohansson-ST - #131427) (documentation) History Stats After this change, `history_stats` in `time` or `ratio` mode will only count definitively known time-based recorded data. Prior to this change, if the start of the time window was earlier than the oldest datapoint in the recorder, `history_stats` would count time using the assumption that an entity was in the first state it found since the beginning of time. This could lead to wild overcalculations when a switch was turned on after a long period of inactivity, and `history_stats` would assume it had _always_ been on and calculate a huge value based on that. (@karwosts - #126271) (documentation) Jewish Calendar To support Rosh Chodesh this creates a breaking change as the holiday sensor will return “Chanukah, Rosh Chodesh” when both of those days fall on the same date. If you have an automation expecting the “Chanukah” value, you must update it. (@tsvi - #130456) (documentation) Plugwise For the Plugwise Adam, all device-based climate entities will be replaced by new zone-based climate entities, which will most likely have different entity names. This change aligns with the Plugwise App’s representation of climate entities as zones (as discovered in Issue #130597). (@bouwew - #131659) (documentation) QNAP The QNAP sensors will no longer have the following extra state attributes: * `memory_free` * `memory_percent_used` * `memory_size` * `memory_used` * `network_err` * `network_link_status` * `network_max_speed` * `network_rx` * `network_tx` * `status` * `system_temp` * `uptime` * `volume_percentage_used` * `volume_size_free` * `volume_size_total` * `volume_size_used` These extra state attributes were deprecated in Home Assistant 2024.6 and have now been removed. If you are using this in your automation or script, use the separate available sensors instead. (@jbouwh - #130310) (documentation) Spotify The Spotify audio feature sensors have been removed since Spotify removed access for them, starting 27 November. Additionally, featured and category playlists have been removed from the Spotify media browser since Spotify deprecated the API, starting on 27 November. (@joostlek - #131754 #131758) (documentation) Statistics Previously the attributes of the entity states of the Statistics integration were only provided when they had a non `None` value. This has now changed so the attributes are always provided even with `None` values. You might need to modify your automations or scripts depending on whether these attributes are present or not. (@gjohansson-ST - #129353) (documentation) Stookwijzer The Stookwijzer sensor has migrated to the new API provided by Atlas Leefomgeving. As a result, the reported states are slightly different. Old versus new: * Blue (`blauw`) -> Yellow (`code_yellow`) * Orange (`oranje`) -> Orange (`code_orange`) * Red (`rood`) -> Red (`code_red`) If you use the Stookwijzer sensor in your automations or scripts, you might need to adjust those for this change. (@frenck - #131567) (documentation) Templates The `this` template variable which is available in some templatable helpers was previously based on the new state instead of the current state. The change affects the following integrations, if templates use the `this` variable. The user might have to update their templates to reflect the above change using the `value` variable instead, which holds the new value. * `command_line` * `rest` * `scrape` * `snmp` * `sql` (@gjohansson-ST - #130135) Z-Wave With this release, you will need to update your zwave-js-server instance. You must use zwave-js-server 1.39.0 or greater (schema 39). * If you use the Z-Wave JS add-on, you need at least version `0.9.0`. * If you use the Z-Wave JS UI add-on, you need at least version `3.17.0`. * If you use the Z-Wave JS UI Docker container, you need at least version `9.26.0`. * If you run your own Docker container or some other installation method, you will need to update your zwave-js-server instance to at least `1.39.0`. (@MindFreeze - #129482) (documentation) 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: * Camera API changes * Integration quality scale * New options flow properties * Translating units of measurement * Utility function homeassistant.util.dt.utc_to_timestamp is deprecated ## 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 2024.12

**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

Web-based IDEs like Arduino and Github Codespaces are now commonplace. They are hobbled in Firefox due to an inability to access development boards without installing extra system software, which rather defeats the purpose of having an IDE that runs in your browser. This is not the case on Chrome, w...

Happy holidays! Before we disappear into family time and catching up on our favorite shows, we have one more episode for you. And it's 90 minutes of deep nerdery about the smart home. Every year, we try to dig into one standard or spec that has impacted our lives this year, and we couldn't think of anything more potentially great and occasionally infuriating than Matter. Matter is supposed to be the protocol that makes the smart home work — so, uh, how's that going? The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins to discuss the state of the smart home, before we play a game to see how well we understand things. Then, Home Assistant creator Paulus Schoutsen tells us what it's like to try and make Matter work, and where we might be headed next year. Further reading: Subscribe: http://goo.gl/G5RXGs Like The Verge on Facebook: https://goo.gl/2P1aGc Follow on Twitter: https://goo.gl/XTWX61 Follow...

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