Welcome to Voice Chapter 11 🎉, our long-running series where we share all the key developments in Open Voice. In this chapter, we will tell you how our assistant can now control more things in the home, in multiple languages at the same time, all while not talking your ear off. What’s more, our list of supported languages has grown again with several languages that big tech’s voice assistants won’t support. Join us for a deeper look at this voice chapter in our livestream on Wednesday, October 29. It’s been a couple of months, we’ve been building up our voice, and now have a lot to say, so let’s get to it!

Today, we’re announcing that we will no longer be producing Home Assistant Yellow. Rest assured, it will continue to receive software support far into the future.

I’m Carl, Vice President of Commercial at Nabu Casa, the organization that builds and sells official hardware for the Open Home Foundation. I couldn’t be more proud of our hardware achievements over the past 12 months, including Voice Preview Edition and Connect ZWA-2 (including its cool new Wi-Fi and PoE experimental firmware).

Home Assistant Yellow was similarly groundbreaking at launch and helped fund Home Assistant’s development. However, for reasons I’ll explain below, the time has come to end production. This means that if you were considering buying a Home Assistant Yellow, you’ll need to act fast, as stock will not be replenished (check the Order Now button on the Home Assistant Yellow page to see if your local retailer still has stock).

Nabu Casa is now exploring what hardware could replace Home Assistant Yellow, so if you have any suggestions on what we should do next, please tell us in the comments! In the meantime, the good news is that there are already plenty of other great ways to run Home Assistant. For example, if you’re looking for hardware that’s both easy to start with and supports the Open Home Foundation, we’d recommend the Home Assistant Green.

A golden era

There is a long yellow brick road that brought us to today. All the way back in 2021, we announced Home Assistant Yellow (originally called Amber). It included some pretty unique features, including its built-in Zigbee or Thread adapter, optional PoE, and overall expandable approach. As it used the Raspberry Pi Compute Module platform, included GPIO, and had an NVMe slot, there were a lot of different ways you could upgrade it over time (including people being able to upgrade from CM4 to CM5, which was quite the speed bump 🏎️).

It wasn’t all smooth sailing with Home Assistant Yellow. We essentially launched the device in the middle of the great Pi shortage. It definitely complicated things for a time, but it all eventually stabilized. In late 2023, we launched Home Assistant Green, which became the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant. This new product led us to end the sale of Home Assistant Yellow devices that shipped with a CM4 already installed (called the Home Assistant Yellow Standard), which allowed us to focus the product line on the kit versions.

Small, but so much room for activities

Home Assistant Green continues to have strong sales, but Home Assistant Yellow sales have been naturally slowing down, as happens a couple of years into any product’s life. This month, it finally reached the point where it no longer made sense to have another production run, which ultimately pushed us to discontinue Home Assistant Yellow.

Technology changes, and small-form-factor computing has always moved fast. For instance, in the early days of Home Assistant, the community’s de facto recommendation was always the most recent Raspberry Pi device, but we’re seeing more people gravitate towards Mini PCs. We’re now exploring what we could build next for our power users, but we’re still some way off, so don’t wait if you need something today.

Software support continues

As long as it’s possible to run Home Assistant on Yellow, we will continue to provide builds. If you want living proof of this commitment, take our first hardware device: Home Assistant Blue. It ended production in 2022, but still receives new builds of Home Assistant, something that shows no signs of changing for a long time. We continue to streamline and make Home Assistant more efficient, as it’s our goal for you to run it on the hardware you have.

Say ‘ellow to the future

I’d just like to take a moment to thank everyone who bought a Home Assistant Yellow over the years, and for all the great feedback you shared with us. We’re sad to say goodbye to our trusty little expandable powerhouse, but it’s had a good run and we’re super proud of how far we’ve come. Also, we’ll soon be announcing the date of our next hardware product (not a computing device… but something very cool nonetheless), so stay tuned!

Last month, we launched the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2, our take on the best possible Z-Wave adapter. Based on the reviews, it sounds like we hit the mark 😎. Today, we’re announcing a new, experimental firmware that allows you to do even more with the ultimate Z-Wave adapter.

I’m Keith, a Senior Hardware and Software Engineer at Nabu Casa, but you also might know me from my work on the ESPHome project. If you weren’t aware, Nabu Casa is the commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation, and the organization that helps build official Home Assistant hardware.

During the launch, one piece of feedback we often received was that people wanted more flexibility in where they could place Connect ZWA-2 in their home — often far away from their Home Assistant system. It was no easy feat (more on that below), but we were able to build a solution that allows you to put it anywhere you have a network connection.

This experimental firmware will allow you to not only leverage the Wi-Fi chip inside the Connect ZWA-2, but also use it with other hardware to facilitate the use of the much-requested PoE. 🎉 This new firmware is only possible because of the second-generation platform we built Connect ZWA-2 on, which is open by design, allowing you to tinker and extend the device you own. Every piece of Home Assistant hardware reflects Nabu Casa and the foundation’s philosophy of constant evolution, and the software it launches with is just the beginning. Whenever we think of a cool new capability, we will work together to add it.

If you want to start using your Connect ZWA-2 with Portable Z-Wave today, visit the brand new home for all the foundation’s web-based tools. Just be aware that this is experimental, and we recommend you read through this blog to understand how it works and its limitations. You can also watch the upcoming ESPHome livestream, where we’ll discuss this new tech in depth.

Works with Home Assistant is opening its doors to another new partner who is bringing the first Garage Door Openers and Alarm Panel to the program, all of which are using ESPHome under the hood. Konnected are well known for their devices that let you retrofit new smarts into the devices you already have, allowing you to use them in Home Assistant and keep them working longer.

Boo! 👻

We just celebrated our birthday 🥳, which means it is time for spooky season; get ready for Halloween! And, hello to the October release of Home Assistant 2025.10! 🎃

This release iterates on some of the features we introduced in the last couple of releases, but also introduces some brand-new ones!

The highlight of this release is definitely the iterations of the automation editor, which gained a sidebar last release, and now has gained undo/redo functionality, a resizable sidebar, improved copy/paste, and more! Thanks for all the feedback you provided on the previous release; it made a massive difference in this release.

Using multiple wake words for voice assistants is now possible, which opens up a lot of possibilities, especially for dual-language households (like mine 😉). Dashboards get more intelligent by suggesting entities based on your usage patterns, and the AI Task can now generate images, which I’m curious to see what the community will do with it!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Every September, we celebrate the anniversary of Home Assistant’s first PR in 2013 – for our 12th birthday, we’re going all in on community again. Last month, we asked for submissions on how Home Assistant helps you, and today we will highlight our favorites! We will also take a look at all the cool milestones over the past year in the project, thanks to contributions from you all, and the new things coming up for the community.

Last year, we laid out our vision for AI in the smart home, which opened up experimentation with AI in Home Assistant. In that update, we made it easier to integrate all sorts of local and cloud AI tools, and provided ways to use them to control and automate your home. A year has passed, a lot has happened in the AI space, and our community has made sure that Home Assistant has stayed at the frontier.

We beat big tech to the punch; we were the first to make AI useful in the home. We did it by giving our community complete control over how and when they use AI, making AI a powerful tool to use in the home. As opposed to something that takes over your home. Our community is taking advantage of AI’s unique abilities (for instance, its image recognition or summarizing skills), while having the ability to exclude it from mission-critical things they’d prefer it not to handle. Best of all, this can all be run locally, without any data leaving your home!

Moreover, if users don’t want AI in their homes, that’s their choice, and they can choose not to enable any of these features. I hope to see big tech take an approach this measured, but judging by their last couple of keynotes, I’m not holding my breath.

Over the past year, we’ve added many new AI features and made them easy to use directly through Home Assistant’s user interface. We have kept up with all the developments in AI land and are using the latest standard to integrate more models and tools than ever before. We’re also continuing to benchmark local and cloud models to give users an idea of what works best. Keep reading to check out everything new, and maybe you can teach your smart home some cool new tricks.

Local AI is making the home very natural to control

Big thanks to our AI community contributor team:
@AllenPorter, @shulyaka, @tronikos, @IvanLH, @Joostlek!

Home Assistant 2025.9! 🎉

But before we dive into this release: Did you see we launched a new product? 👀

We’ve introduced the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2, the ultimate way to connect Z-Wave devices to Home Assistant. You can read all about it in our announcement blog 📰 or re-watch the product launch live stream on YouTube 📺.

It was a busy month, as we also had two new Works with Home Assistant program partners joining this month as well: AirGradient and Frient! 🎉

While the above was happening this month, as if the project wasn’t already busy enough, we kept on pushing to prepare for this release; and it is an absolute massive one! 🤯

This month introduces a new experimental Home dashboard, which aims to become the new default dashboard for Home Assistant in a future release. A first iteration, of which we love to see your feedback and input on. As you know, we develop and iterate in the open. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Talking about dashboards, my personal favorite card is definitely the tile card; it is just so versatile. And this release brings in a staggering amount of new features for it! Most notably, the ability to add a trend graph to the tile card! 📈

I’m the most excited about the visual changes to the automation editor this release brings: a sidebar. It is a huge and very visible change, that just makes so much sense. This release denotes the start of a whole series of improvements to the automation editor in this, and upcoming releases. As automations make a smart home feel magical, I personally can’t wait to see how this evolves. 🤖

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

We’re making new frients this week, and they’re bringing an extensive line of Zigbee devices to our Works With Home Assistant program. Each device is tested by our team, ensuring they provide the best experience possible for Home Assistant. Frient is widely available across Europe, and are well-known for their sleek, unobtrusive designs that its customers love for their high Home Approval Factor.

We’re excited to announce that AirGradient is the latest manufacturer to join the fast-growing Works With Home Assistant program! They bring their air quality monitors to the program, with both indoor and outdoor models.

AirGradient is the first partner in the program focused on building advanced indoor and outdoor air quality monitors. They are also well known within our community for their powerful tech, and for their focus on open source and dedication to local air quality projects around the world.