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.
When I (Missy Quarry) joined as the Community & Social Media Manager in February 2024, I was still new to how an open source project the size of Home Assistant manages its community. Over the past 18 months, I’ve seen Home Assistant community members from all walks of life — whether DIY tinkerers or people simply looking to make small improvements at home — contribute in their own ways. By sharing your stories and inspiring others, you’ve helped the project grow. For our 12th birthday, I want to celebrate these contributions, no matter the size or complexity. 😌
Before I jump into celebrating all your amazing contributions and how they shape the projects managed by the Open Home Foundation, I have a couple of birthday presents for you. 🎁
First, I’m thrilled to share our new Community website! Right now, it’s a simple hub to find community information with ease, but we expect to evolve this over the coming months (or so). You’ll find links to our official community platforms, information on events, and details on meetups, including how to get reimbursed for certain fees as a host. In the future, I’d like to include links to regional communities we’re aware of and showcase more of the kinds of stories I’ll be sharing today.
Feel like something’s missing from this new page? Let me know!
Next, we’ve been working hard to do more of our development in the open. Last September, I redesigned the Discord server and in doing so I gated the Developer category behind a role. This has made it more difficult to develop in the open with the channels hidden behind a role, so we’re switching things up.
As of this week, the Developer category is now read-only for every member. Want to take a peek into the future of Home Assistant? Head to the #projects channel and see what contributors are talking about! Want to join in and contribute with either your feedback or skills? I’ve created an info thread for the channel that explains how to assign yourself either the Developer or Designer role and unlock the ability to chat in the threads.
Let’s jump into those submitted stories now… 🤩
In my opinion, the best thing about Home Assistant is its flexibility - you can integrate such a wide range of devices into it and use their data to build a unique-to-your-home experience. And that’s exactly why I wanted to hear how you, the community, use it in your own home to benefit you. Here are my favorite stories you submitted - I hope one inspires your next project. ✨
A coffee automation to improve Home Approval Factor. ☕️ Jordan made a morning automation to avoid having the coffee grinder grind his morning mood.
u/katschung helped their girlfriend fully accept Home Assistant by creating a dashboard with a retrogame-style floor plan. 🕹️
Sythsaz uses Home Assistant to make sure their pupper is fed. 🐾 “I’ve managed to make it so my dog’s food auto emails the vet then the response to the email gets put on my calendar so I know how long a bag of food lasts as well as adding the receipts to Google Drive.”
Inspired by PowerDisplayESPHome, JannickBlmndl made an LED matrix that helps their household be more sustainable by being energy flexible. It displays the live energy prices from their energy provider. 📊
Tano Spirits in Melbourne, Australia, uses Home Assistant to automate their Japanese Shochu distillery, inspired by a small brewing company in Singapore. 🍻
Several years ago, HillPhantom found that Home Assistant wasn’t quite ready for him. Over the past year, though, he’s now got Ollama set up with his Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and has been building guides on how to make your own mmWave radar sensors in Home Assistant. 👋🏻
Over just a few weeks, Pieter van Kampen recently integrated 190 devices that respond to voice control and more than 1200 active entities from his KNX home to create over 30 automations to help with everything from mowing the lawn to controlling shades based on the sun’s location and intensity. 🪟
MB used Zigbee buttons to help collect data for their son’s doctor after he developed some trouble sleeping. This gave excellent insight for the doctor to start looking into causes, and they even used the system remotely while doing further evaluation. 📈
Graham Hosking took automations to another level (before we did) with his AI Automation Suggester and Automation Inspector. It takes the load off your brain by helping come up with new, clever automations! 🤖
Wessam Lauf fell down the rabbit hole that is Home Assistant once he got his setup running. Inspired by the Graphite theme and after some LLM vibe-coding, he wrote a template for his very own theme, Frosted Glass - now available in HACS. 🎨
Too many of us anthropomorphize our homes, telling it to chill out when five things break the same day. Biofects took that to heart and created this Home Assistant avatar for his home (here’s a bonus, nightmare fuel first version). 🫣
Our community is more than developers, it’s true. But we wouldn’t be the largest open source project on GitHub if we didn’t have a vibrant and active developer community. This ship sails largely due to their contributions, and we genuinely appreciate all of their efforts.
That’s why we’re eager to interview community members when we open new roles at the foundation. We’ve employed community members like Joostlek (who designed the new Integration Quality Scale and helps onboard new integrations into Core), Timo (who is our first ever Android developer and has focused on polishing the Android app), and Maxim (a talented developer from the Music Assistant community who works on both Music Assistant and ESPHome and is one of our newest additions to the team). Their contributions have helped shape how things work around here, but it was their contributions as community members that helped pave the way for their joining the foundation. These are just a select few of the several new hires at the foundation who were active community members.
(Have you checked our jobs page recently to see what roles are open? 👀)
With our community of contributors and working with Nabu Casa on the hardware design, we have successfully launched a few new pieces of hardware. The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition brought in language experts from every corner of the world to help ensure our language coverage is the most robust in the industry. Thanks to contributors, we support languages like Greek, Icelandic, and more recently Irish Gaeilge! 😎 We had community contributors help make sure the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 was prepared for launch last month. Sincerely, we couldn’t be more grateful for your support and efforts in these spaces.
Here are some fun stats from our GitHub contributors (commits on our Core repo):
A SPECIAL CONGRATULATIONS to bdraco, who just last week surpassed balloob (the founder of Home Assistant) as the contributor with the most commits!
The top 8 contributors of all time in home-assistant/core👏🏻
This is just a small peek into all the hard work that goes into maintaining Home Assistant - we have more repositories than just Core, and every single contribution is valued.
Honorable dev mention from the submitted community stories - I couldn’t leave Joostlek’s (joke) submission out. 🤣
Community is the core of what we do and the heart of Home Assistant. We thrive because you care and contribute your valuable time to support our collective success. Whether you found our platform because you wanted more privacy from big tech, were intrigued by the number of choices implemented into a single app, or needed something to track your sustainability efforts — you support our values every day. Thanks for choosing us, and thank you for all you do to help support the foundation and the projects we maintain.
A very special thanks to all our Home Assistant Cloud subscribers and anyone who has purchased our official Home Assistant hardware. These support the full-time development of Home Assistant (along with ESPHome, Music Assistant, and so much more), and are the easiest way to ensure these projects keep getting cool new features!
We have more things coming down the line for you. In the near future, we plan on announcing a new merch store 👕. In the first half of next year, I’ll announce when Home Assistant Community Day 2026 will be. We’re already working with Nabu Casa on the next exciting hardware announcement (no spoilers…for now). And that’s not even touching the industry events we plan on attending, the State of the Open Home, and so much more. I’m excited to take you all on the journey we’re already working on over the next 12 months, and I’m always looking forward to another year of amazing contributions. 😌
Fixed USER_CREATED, USER_UPDATED, DATE_CREATED, and DATE_UPDATED values in content versioning. These fields now correctly reflect the actual user and timestamp of creation or last update, rather than the user and date of promotion. (#25744)
Requesting a non-existent version will now return a Forbidden error.
The USER_CREATED, USER_UPDATED, DATE_CREATED, and DATE_UPDATED fields will now represent the last actual changes, not the promotion metadata.
@directus/app
@directus/api
Log inUSER_CREATED, USER_UPDATED, DATE_CREATED, and DATE_UPDATED values in content versioning. These fields now correctly reflect the actual user and timestamp of creation or last update, rather than the user and date of promotion. (#25744 by @Nitwel)@directus/app@14.0.0@directus/api@31.0.0@directus/composables@11.2.3@directus/constants@13.0.3create-directus-extension@11.0.19@directus/env@5.2.0@directus/errors@2.0.4@directus/extensions@3.0.11@directus/extensions-registry@3.0.11@directus/extensions-sdk@16.0.2@directus/format-title@12.1.0@directus/memory@3.0.9@directus/pressure@3.0.9@directus/schema@13.0.3@directus/schema-builder@0.0.6@directus/storage@12.0.2@directus/storage-driver-azure@12.0.9@directus/storage-driver-cloudinary@12.0.9@directus/storage-driver-gcs@12.0.9@directus/storage-driver-local@12.0.2@directus/storage-driver-s3@12.0.9@directus/storage-driver-supabase@3.0.9@directus/stores@1.0.4@directus/system-data@3.3.0@directus/themes@1.1.5@directus/types@13.2.3@directus/update-check@13.0.3@directus/utils@13.0.10@directus/validation@2.0.9@directus/sdk@20.1.0
Updates:
Fixes:
Updates:
Additions/improvements:
Fixes:
This is the last version of Companion to support macOS 11. Starting with Companion 4.2 you will need to be running macOS 12 or later.
This release focuses on polishing the UI.
A major addition is "collections" — a way to group connections, triggers, or custom variables so you can manage or enable/disable them together. Collections make organising complex setups and toggling related items during events much easier.
We also made a number of small adjustments to improve clarity and flow, such as reworking table layouts in many places.
These changes prioritise organisation and usability so you can work more quickly.
On each button or trigger you can now define local variables. These variables are scoped to that single button or trigger — they do not exist outside of it. Local variables can be configured in a few ways:
A key point: not all actions and feedbacks support local variables. Supported items will show a globe icon to indicate compatibility. We're working to broaden support; modules will add compatibility over time and further improvements are planned for 4.2.
Expressions let you build more complex configurations and transform data flowing into or out of connections. They allow you to normalise, combine, or conditionally modify values before they're consumed or sent.
The new Expression Variables page lets you define variables computed from expressions. These can be referenced wherever connection or custom variables are accepted; their value is calculated from the expression you provide.
Expression variables can:
Notes:
Companion now supports custom backup rules, allowing you to schedule backups, and keep more restore points.
You can pick how often to run, where to store them, choose how many to keep (auto-pruned), and select the file format.
Tip: Saving backups to a synced folder (Dropbox, OneDrive, or similar), automatically keeps an off-site copy — great for extra safety and easy access across machines.
Full Changelog: v4.0.3...v4.1.0
On Windows, Firefox now supports running websites as web apps pinned directly to the taskbar. These are sites that you can pin and run as simplified windows directly from the taskbar without losing access to your installed add-ons. This feature is not currently available for Firefox installs from the Microsoft Store.
Tabs can now be pinned by dragging them to the start of the tab strip, making it easier to keep important sites within reach.
Copilot from Microsoft can now be chosen as a chatbot to use in the sidebar for quick access without leaving your main view.
When a site asks for camera access, it can now be previewed inside the permission dialog. This is especially helpful when switching between multiple cameras.
The Firefox address bar can now show you important dates and events. This feature supports displaying events (e.g. “Mother’s Day”) in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy regions.
Firefox has expanded its Fingerprinting Protection by reporting constant values for several more attributes of user's computers.
When downloading a file in Private Browsing mode, Firefox now asks whether to keep or delete it after that session ends. You can adjust this behavior in Settings.
Firefox now supports Windows UI Automation, which improves support for accessibility tools such as Windows Voice Access, Text Cursor Indicator and Narrator.
This feature is part of a progressive roll out.
Certain new Firefox features are released gradually. This means some users will see the feature before everyone does. This approach helps to get early feedback to catch bugs and improve behavior quickly, meaning more Firefox users overall have a better experience.
Various security fixes.
You can find information about policy updates and enterprise specific bug fixes in the Firefox for Enterprise 143 Release Notes.
Unchecking the Group Similar Messages setting now prevents successive similar messages from being grouped so that all messages are displayed in the output.
Switching between unmodified and pretty printed sources in the debugger no longer opens a new tab for pretty printed content.
When the Inspector is focused, the eyedropper can now be launched to pick a color via the Ctrl+Shift+Y keyboard shortcut.
Firefox now supports xHE-AAC audio playback on Windows 11 22H2+, macOS, and Android 9+.
Firefox now uses an updated grid sizing algorithm to better align with the CSS Grid specification. Grid layouts that use percentage row sizes or grid items containing elements with aspect ratios (such as images) will now render correctly in more cases.
<input type=color> now recognizes the CSS <color> format in addition to the color hex format (#ffffff). This means that color names like black and more complex strings like rgb(200 200 200) are now valid inputs. For now the value will always be converted to the hex format.
Restrictions were removed that prevented setting the display property on <details> elements, and a ::details-content pseudo-element was added to style the expandable/collapsible contents of those elements.
With the release of Firefox 143, we are pleased to welcome the developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 12 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:
Note
If someone is asking you to pay money for access to UpSnap binaries, source code, or licenses, you are being scammed.
The official and only trusted source for UpSnap is this repository (and its linked releases).
Do not pay third parties for something that is provided here for free.
Note
If someone is asking you to pay money for access to UpSnap binaries, source code, or licenses, you are being scammed.
The official and only trusted source for UpSnap is this repository (and its linked releases).
Do not pay third parties for something that is provided here for free.
there is a discord server with an @everyone in case of future important updates, such as vulnerabilities (most recently 2025-09-07)
casechk: n if you know you don't need itsrch-icase--qr-stdout and --qr-stderr to show qr-code even with -q d7887f3?v did not work as documented 3d09bec--help didn't render if terminal was non-UTF8 3f45492conductor is no longer mapped to circle (album-artist) 9c9e405sel-FOLDERNAME.zip instead of FIRSTFILE.zip 8f58762
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!
We were doing voice assistants before AI was cool. In 2023, we kicked off our Year of the Voice. Since then, we’ve worked towards our goal of building all the parts needed for a local, open, and private voice assistant. When AI became the rage, we were quick to integrate it.
Today, users can chat with any large language model (LLM) that is integrated into Home Assistant, whether that’s in the cloud or run locally via a service like Ollama. Where Assist, our home-grown (non-AI) voice assistant agent, is focused on a predetermined list of mostly home control commands, AI allows you to ask more open-ended questions. Summarize what’s happening across the smart home sensors you’ve exposed to Assist, or get answers to trivia questions. You can even give your LLM a personality!
Users can also leverage the power of AI to speak the way they speak, as LLMs are much better at understanding the intent behind the words. By default, Assist will handle commands first. Only questions or commands it can’t understand will be sent to the AI you’ve set up. For instance, “Turn on the kitchen light” can be handled by Assist, while “It’s dark in the kitchen, can you help?” could be processed by an AI. This speeds up response times for simple commands and makes for a more sustainable voice assistant.
Another powerful addition from the past year is context sharing between agents. So your Assist agent can share the most recent commands with your chosen AI agent. This shared context lets you say something like “Add milk to my shopping list,” which Assist will act on, and to add more items, just say “Add rice.” The AI agent understands that these commands are connected and can act accordingly.
Here is an excellent walkthrough video of JLo's AI-powered home, showing many of these new features in action
Another helpful addition keeps the conversation going; if the LLM asks you a question, your Assist hardware will listen for your reply. If you say something like “It’s dark”, it might ask whether you’d like to turn on some lights, and you could tell it to proceed. We have taken this even further than other voice assistants, as you can now have Home Assistant initiate conversations. For example, you could set up an automation that detects when the garage door is open and asks if you’d like to close it (though this can also be done without AI with a very clever Blueprint).
AI pushed us to completely revamp our Text-to-Speech (TTS) system to take advantage of streaming responses from LLMs. While local AI models can be slow, we use a simple trick to make the delay almost unnoticeable. Now, both Piper (our local TTS) and Home Assistant Cloud TTS can begin generating audio as soon as the LLM produces the first few words, improving the speed of the spoken response by a factor of ten.
Prompt: “Tell me a long story about a frog”
| Setup | Time to start speaking |
|---|---|
| Cloud, non-streaming | 6.62 sec |
| Cloud, streaming | 0.51 sec (13x faster) |
| Piper, non-streaming | 5.31 sec |
| Piper, streaming | 0.56 sec (9.5x faster) |
Ollama gemma3:4b on an RTX 3090, and Piper on an i5
People built some really cool voice hardware, from landline telephones to little talking robots, but the fact that it was so DIY was always a barrier to entry. To make our voice assistant available to everyone, we released the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. This is an easy and affordable way to try Home Assistant Voice. It has some seriously powerful audio processing hardware inside its sleek package. If you were on the fence about trying out voice, it really is the best way to get started.
Voice Preview Edition is not only open and powerful, but it looks and feels great too!
It’s now easier than ever to set up your Assist hardware to work with LLMs with our Voice Assistants settings page, and you can even assign a different LLM to each device. The LLM can recognize the room it’s in and the devices within it, making its responses more relevant. Assist was built to be a great way to control devices in your home, but with AI, it becomes so much more.
Last month, Home Assistant launched a new opt-in feature to leverage the power of AI when automating with Home Assistant. The goal is to shorten the journey from a blank slate to your finished idea.
When saving an automation or script, users can now leverage the new Suggest button: 
When clicked, it will send your automation configuration along with the titles of your existing automations and labels to AI to suggest a name, description, category, and labels for your new automation. Over the coming months, we’re going to explore what other features can benefit from AI suggestions.
To opt-in to this feature, you need to take two steps. First, you need to configure an integration that provides an AI Tasks entity. For local AI, you can configure Ollama, or you can also leverage cloud-based AI like Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Once configured, you need to go to the new AI Task preferences pane under System -> General and pick the AI Task entity to power suggestions in the UI. If you don’t configure an AI Tasks entity, the Suggest button will not be visible.
Enabling AI Tasks does more than quickly label and summarize your automations; its true superpower is making AI easy to use in templates, scripts, and automations. AI Tasks allow other code to leverage AI to generate data, including options to attach files and define how you want that data output (for instance, a JSON schema).
We have all seen those incredible community creations, where a user leverages AI image recognition and analysis to detect available parking spots or count the number of chickens in the chicken coop. It’s likely that AI Tasks can now help you easily do this in Home Assistant, without the need for complex scripts, extra add-ons, or HACS integrations.
Below is a template entity that counts chickens in a video feed, all via a short and simple set of instructions.
template:
- triggers:
- trigger: homeassistant
event: start
- trigger: time_pattern
minutes: "/5"
actions:
- action: ai_task.generate_data
data:
task_name: Count chickens
instructions: >-
This is the inside of my coop. How many birds (chickens, geese, and
ducks) are inside the coop?
structure:
birds:
selector:
number:
attachments:
media_content_id: media-source://camera/camera.chicken_coop
media_content_type: image/jpeg
response_variable: result
sensor:
- name: "Chickens"
state: "{{ result.data.birds }}"
state_class: total
This template sends a snapshot of the camera to the AI, asking it to analyze what is going on. It defines that the output should always be a number, since we want to use that information in Home Assistant. All of this is embedded in a template entity that automatically updates every 5 minutes. An AI Task could also be embedded in an automation, a script, or any other place that can execute actions.
An automation triggers an AI Task to identify what caused motion on a camera.
Lastly, users can set a default AI Task entity. This allows users to skip picking an entity ID when creating AI automations. It also lets you migrate everything that uses AI Tasks to the latest model with a single click. This also makes it easy to share blueprints that leverage AI Tasks, like this blueprint that analyzes a camera snapshot when motion is detected:
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a thin layer allowing LLMs to integrate anything. When the specification was announced, we quickly jumped on it and integrated it into Home Assistant. Effectively, these servers give Home Assistant’s Assist conversation agent access to all sorts of new tools. You could connect MCP servers that give Assist access to the latest news stories, your to-do lists, or a server that catalogues your vinyl collection, allowing you to have richer conversations (“Okay Nabu, which Replacements albums do I have, and which aren’t on my Vinyl-to-Purchase list?”).
On the flip side, you can also turn Home Assistant into an MCP server, allowing an AI system to access information about your home. For instance, you could create a local AI that’s great at making Home Assistant automations, and it could include all your entity names or available actions. MCP keeps gaining more support, and there are some great cloud and self-hosted solutions available.
There are a lot of models available, it’s hard to know where to start. Luckily, Home Assistant’s resident AI guru @AllenPorter is here to help. He has put together an incredibly useful Home LLM Leaderboard. This dataset includes his extensive tests of cloud and local LLM options, and even has tests that give small local LLMs a fighting chance (see assist-mini).
Currently, the charts show the big cloud players’ most recent models ranking pretty close to each other, while recent local models that use 8GB or more of VRAM are nearly keeping up. In the past, there was a big disparity between most models, but now it’s hard to go wrong.
This is especially helpful as the options for LLMs in Home Assistant have just grown exponentially with the addition of OpenRouter, a unified interface for LLMs. With OpenRouter, users can access over 400 new models in Home Assistant, and it supports AI Tasks right from day one. We really are spoiled for choice.
Home Assistant is open. We believe that you should be in control of your data, and your smart home. All of it. Local LLMs and the way we have architected Home Assistant extends this choice to the AI space, all while maintaining your privacy.
Most crucially, we’ve made all of this open source. We are community-driven and work on this together with our community. The Open Home Foundation has no investors and is not beholden to anyone but our users. Our work is funded through hardware purchases and Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions, allowing us to make all the technology we build free and open.
This is the second beta release for 0.19! ✨ This beta solves multiple problems. Including some crashes preventing the app from being used. As always, the full changelog is below. For the previous changelog see v0.19.0-beta.1.
If you appreciate my work, you can show your support with a donation through GitHub sponsors (Credit card only) or through Buy Me a Coffee. Your support helps me continue improving and growing the app. Thank you!
Beta versions are not guaranteed to work as expected. We encourage users to create detailed bug reports if any problems arise. Read our blog post for more information about our Android beta programs.
Important
If you are using Part-DB it would be helpful if you fill out this short survey on your usage of Part-DB (Google Forms): https://forms.gle/Q15twx3YYq3qCNfe8
Tip
You can help to translate Part-DB to other languages. See this post for more info.
