Home Assistant 2025.8! 🎉

In most parts of the world, summer mode is in full effect! ☀️ Many at the Open Home Foundation and many of our contributors are enjoying a well-deserved break from work and open source. I hope that you are maybe enjoying a well-deserved break as well! 🏖️

Summer breaks or not, we are currently very busy with our next product launch! In case you have missed it, this upcoming Wednesday, August 13 (12:00 PM PT, 3:00 PM ET, 21:00 CEST), we will have an extra live stream to announce the next big thing in the Home Assistant Connect series! Be sure to head over to YouTube to hit the reminder button so you don’t miss it! Z-Wave is not dead! 🌊

Alright, on to the release! We keep moving during summer and are excited to bring you the August release of Home Assistant!

Let’s start with my personal favorite of this release: The improved experience when viewing a group, for example, a group helper with lights. 💡 When viewing such a group entity, you can now control the individual members of that group directly in that dialog. Super useful! I’m pretty sure that will be used a lot in our house.

But as the release title suggests, this release brings in an important foundation for new AI opportunities in Home Assistant: AI Tasks. Think of it as a way to delegate tasks to AI and get back the result of that task in a structured way so it can be used. Sounds vague? Dive into the release notes below!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

We’re excited to welcome Shelly to the Works with Home Assistant program! Shelly is very well-established in both our ecosystem and the smart home world, so it’s great to formally certify a selection of their Z-Wave devices.

Their retrofit smart switches and relays are amazing for turning all sorts of dumb devices, like light fixtures or ceiling fans, into devices you can easily control in smart new ways. Also, being Works with certified means they have been thoroughly tested, ensuring they give the best possible experience with Home Assistant.

The variety of complex settings and functionality, like energy monitoring, makes them popular with our community doing advanced smart retrofits, like connecting an old garage door or motorized shutters. These are perfect for keeping non-smart devices out of the landfill and working for years to come.

The Home Assistant companion app for Android just keeps getting better with every release, and recently, it gained some dedicated support to help accelerate its development. Several months ago, I (Timothy Nibeaudeau, also known as @TimoPtr) joined the Open Home Foundation as our dedicated Android developer 🎉.

It’s been over two years, and hundreds of thousands of installs, since we’ve published a dedicated update for our community on the development of the app, and I’d like to give you a quick update on recent improvements and what’s coming next.

Our Works with Home Assistant program is expanding once again, and this time we’re excited to announce Zooz is joining us! We have tested many new devices of all different types, ensuring they provide the best experience possible with Home Assistant. As well as classic staples for the smart home, they also bring some very cool flood protection devices to help safeguard your home.

These will be the first certified Z-Wave devices added to the program in some time, and are just part of the exciting future the Home Assistant community and Zooz see for this smart home protocol.

We’re thrilled to welcome Nuki to the Works with Home Assistant program! Nuki creates some slick-looking smart locks that you can fit to most doors (or even on top of existing locks). They are constantly pioneering new and exciting features, while also using the open standards we support. Nuki is today bringing three different lock types to the program, all certified by our team to provide the best experience possible with Home Assistant.

Home Assistant 2025.7! 🎉

Whew! It’s hot out there! 🌡️ While most of Europe is dealing with a heat wave right now, we’re here to cool things down with an exciting July release that’s packed with features I’m genuinely excited about.

Before we dive in, if you missed it, we recently published Voice Chapter 10 where we explored moving beyond reactive voice assistants that only respond when you talk to them. Instead, we envisioned a future where your voice assistant can be conversational and initiate conversations. Speaking of that, this release delivers on that vision in a big way!

I’m absolutely stoked about the new Ask Question action for Assist! 🗣️ This is something that sets Home Assistant apart from every other voice assistant out there. Finally, your voice assistant can take the initiative and ask you what your smart home should do. No more waiting for wake words, your assistant can start the conversation when it makes sense. It’s the kind of feature that gets me really excited thinking about all the possibilities.

The redesigned Area card is another winner! 🏠 I’ll probably be replacing a few tile cards I’ve been using to navigate to my area dashboards with this new, more flexible version. It integrates beautifully with the Sections dashboard and gives you so many more options for controlling your spaces.

And that’s just the beginning! We’ve got integration sub-entries making integrations even more extensible, full-screen code editors for those lengthy YAML and template edits, and tons of quality-of-life improvements throughout.

Stay cool, and enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Please welcome the latest addition to the Works with Home Assistant program, SwitchBot! This year has seen a lot of ‘firsts’ within the program, and this launch certainly keeps up this trend. Read on to see the first Air Purifiers and Vacuums / Cleaning Robots! What’s more, SwitchBot is bringing this first set of devices into the program with multiple connectivity options. Pick from their Bluetooth integration, Matter via a hub, or standalone Matter devices as well. All this gives you even more choice in how you set up your smart home, while providing the best experience with Home Assistant.

Welcome to Voice chapter 10 🎉, a series where we share all the key developments in Open Voice. This chapter includes improvements across every element of Open Voice. Improvements that allow it to support more languages, be used on more hardware, make it easier to contribute to, all while making it faster and more reliable.

Help steer Open Voice

Before we get going, we just want to say that Voice Chapter 10 isn’t just a broadcast; it’s an invitation ✉️. Our public Voice project board lives on GitHub, and it shows what we’re fixing, currently building, and what we’ll work on next. Every card is open for comments, so please feel free to have a look and participate in the discussion.

👉 Project board: https://github.com/orgs/OHF-Voice/projects/2

Our first Home Assistant Community Day was a humbling success — we knew that the community had a desire to have something coordinated like this, but we really did not expect just how widely this would spread. 💖

So much happened in such a short window of time, so let’s talk about how this year’s event went and what the future looks like for Home Assistant meetups.

Home Assistant 2025.6! 🎉

We are already half way through 2025, can you believe it? I personally can’t, as it feels like we just started the year. Not just that, there are so many exciting things to still come this year, and I can’t wait to share them with you!

Anyway, the June release is here! A week later than usual, but it also means we had an extra week to polish and beta test this release. Like the previous release, this release is packed with quality-of-life improvements!

Last release my favorite feature was the new entity picker; this release, we improved ALL other pickers! No surprise that this, again, makes it to my top favorite this release. Although the ability to group media players directly from the media player card is a close second. It is so nice to see how Home Assistant keeps getting better and better, and how our community keeps contributing to it. 😍

If you are leveraging Bluetooth in your Home Assistant setup, you will also love the new Bluetooth connection graph that shows how your Bluetooth devices are connected, including Bluetooth proxies. Troubleshooting Bluetooth has become so much easier now!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: We will pick up the regular release schedule again now, so expect the next release on the first Wednesday of July (July 2nd).