Home Assistant typically releases major updates at the beginning of every month. These updates typically contain new features, GUI updates, and additional integrations along with bug fixes and some potential breaking changes.
What is the latest version of Home Assistant?
The latest version of Home Assistant is 2023.12
Home Assistant 2023.12
In the final release of 2023, Home Assistant introduces several exciting enhancements:
Beautiful New Login Page
The login page has been redesigned to be modern and welcoming. When accessed from your local home network, it shows user profiles for seamless login, and it now allows language changes directly from the login page.
New Design for Thermostat Card
The thermostat card receives a stunning redesign to match the entity dialog introduced in a previous release. Features like HVAC mode buttons and presets are now available, providing a cleaner look and added functionality.
Numeric Input Feature for Tile Cards
The powerful tile card is extended with a new “numeric input” feature, allowing direct control of number entities and number helpers. Users can choose between a slider or input with up/down buttons.
Options for Default Dashboard
The default dashboard now offers configuration options. Users can hide specific areas, entities not belonging to an area, and the energy summary card. This provides greater control over the default dashboard’s behavior.
History Dashboard with Long-term Statistics
The history dashboard sees improvements, combining state history with recorded long-term statistics for more comprehensive insights into the past. This enhancement reduces the need for manual adjustments to database settings.
To-Do List Enhancements
To-do list support continues to evolve with the addition of new services to list all items and remove completed items. Integrations like CalDAV, Picnic, and OurGroceries now support adding to-do items, and users can copy/paste or bookmark to-do list URLs for convenience.
Re-import Blueprints
Users can now re-import blueprints from their original source, allowing for easy updates. This feature simplifies keeping blueprints in sync with the latest versions published by the authors.
These quality-of-life improvements, along with the festive feel of Christmas, make this release a fitting end to the Year of the Voice.
Home Assistant 2023.11
In the Home Assistant 2023.11 release, several exciting and noteworthy changes have been introduced:
To-Do Lists and To-Do List Entities:
A new entity type has been added called To-Do List Entities. These entities represent lists of tasks, and their state reflects the number of open tasks.
You can create and manage multiple to-do lists in Home Assistant and automate tasks related to them.
This feature provides great flexibility, allowing you to manage various tasks and even integrate them with external services.
Shopping Lists Now To-Do Lists
The shopping list in Home Assistant has been transformed into a to-do list. Existing shopping lists will be automatically converted to to-do lists in this release.
Integrations for To-Do Lists
Home Assistant now supports integrations for to-do lists, including Todoist and Google Tasks, allowing you to bring in to-do lists from external services.
Matter 1.2
Home Assistant has upgraded its Matter implementation to version 1.2, preparing for new device types and benefiting from stability improvements.
Customizing Tile Cards
The Tile card can now display customized information, including entity states and attributes. This customization is available for all entities, providing more flexibility in dashboard design.
Energy Dashboard Date Range
The energy dashboard now allows users to select a custom date range, providing more control over energy usage data.
New Conditions for Conditional Card
The conditional card introduces new conditions, including user conditions (based on logged-in users), numeric state conditions (based on numeric entity values), and screen conditions (based on the screen size of the device).
Restart in Safe Mode
You can now restart Home Assistant in safe mode, which temporarily disables custom integrations and custom frontend resources. This feature helps troubleshoot issues caused by custom components.
Setting Up Improv Devices
Home Assistant can now help you set up Improv devices over Bluetooth. This feature simplifies the process of adding new devices to your Wi-Fi network and integrating them with Home Assistant.
Configuring Script Fields in the UI
Scripts now support field configuration directly within the Home Assistant UI. This feature allows you to define variables for your scripts and provide a user-friendly interface for configuring them.
Other Changes
Several additional improvements, including HomeKit Bridge enhancements, calendar dashboard improvements, better ZHA network settings management, a new country selector, quality upgrades for the Withings integration, IKEA IDÅSEN desk connection management, Fitbit integration overhaul, SwitchBot Cloud support for climate devices, and more.
New Integrations
New integrations have been added, such as Google Tasks, Improv BLE, Local To-Do List, Tami4 Edge/Edge+, and a virtual integration called Cribl.
These changes and features make Home Assistant even more versatile and user-friendly, offering improved task management, customization options, and integration support.
Home Assistant 2023.10
In this recent Home Assistant update, several exciting changes and features have been introduced:
Refreshed Home Assistant Logo
- Home Assistant celebrated its 10th anniversary with a brand-new logo. This refreshed logo showcases the evolution of the platform.
New My Home Assistant Buttons
- Along with the logo, My Home Assistant buttons have also received a makeover.
- My Home Assistant is a tool that enables seamless linking to your Home Assistant server for websites, documentation, chat platforms, and blogs while ensuring privacy.
- You can now find these buttons in Home Assistant documentation, allowing one-click integration with your Home Assistant.
Tile Card Features for Climate Entities
- The tile card now includes features for controlling climate devices.
- Users can add buttons for presets of their climate device to the tile card, with the option to select which presets to display in a dropdown list.
Tile Card Select Entities
- The tile card now supports select entities, allowing users to choose options from a list.
- This feature can be used for select entities and custom dropdown helpers.
Password Managers Compatibility
- Password managers, including 1Password, are now fully compatible with Home Assistant, enhancing online security for users.
Map Entity Marker Options
- The map card has received new options for entity markers.
- Users can choose whether to display the entity name or state on the map or override the name altogether.
- This is configurable through YAML configuration for the map card.
Other Changes
- ESPHome users will experience smaller Home Assistant backups with the latest version.
- HomeKit Bridge integration now supports media receivers.
- The Roborock integration now includes water and last cleaned sensors.
- Withings integration is easier to set up and works with Home Assistant Cloud webhooks.
- Calendar support has been added to the Rain Bird integration.
- The System Bridge integration now supports notifications.
- Life360 integration includes a button to trigger location updates.
- The picture entity card now has a fit mode option for image display control.
- Z-Wave logs for troubleshooting are easier to collect with debug logging enabled.
New Integrations
- Several new integrations have been added, including Apple WeatherKit, Ecoforest, IKEA IDÅSEN Desk, Medcom Bluetooth, Private BLE Device, SwitchBot Cloud, and WeatherFlow.
New Virtual Integration
- A new virtual integration, Enmax Energy provided by Opower, has been added.
UI Integrations
- Various integrations are now available through the Home Assistant UI, making setup more user-friendly.
Home Assistant 2023.9
In the latest update, several exciting changes and features have been introduced to enhance the functionality of Home Assistant. Let’s take a closer look at these updates:
Climate, Humidifier, and Water Heater Improvements
- The climate, humidifier, and water heater entities have received a significant update. They now feature a newly designed circular slider that displays both the current temperature and the setpoint(s).
- Buttons have been added for adjusting the setpoint, and the current action is indicated by a glowing effect in the middle of the slider.
New Tile Features
This release brings a multitude of new tile features, including:
- HVAC mode tile
- Water heater mode tile
- Temperature control tile
- Cover position tile
- Cover tilt tile
- Introduction of a lawn mower tile
- Color temperature tile
Lawn Mower Integration
- A new entity component, the lawn mower, has been introduced in this release.
- Users can now integrate their lawn mower into Home Assistant, with MQTT support initially, and the promise of future integrations.
Group Previews
- When setting up a helper, you can now preview how the entity will appear with the current settings.
- A new group, the event group, has been added.
Template Sensors from the UI
- Preview support has been added for template sensors in the UI.
- You can use templates to set the state of the sensor, select a unit of measurement, set the device class, and choose a state class.
Actions for Template Entities
- Trigger template entities can now include an action block executed after the trigger but before entity rendering.
- This allows users to fetch data like weather forecasts or calendar events and use them in template entities, aligning with automation syntax.
Weather Forecast Service
- A weather forecast service has been introduced to provide weather forecasts.
- Instead of checking the forecast attribute of a weather entity, you can call the new service
weather.get_forecast. - You can specify the type of forecast you want, daily or hourly, all within a single entity.
- The forecast attribute of weather entities is deprecated and will be removed in Home Assistant Core 2024.3.
Onboarding
The onboarding process has been revamped to provide a fresh and streamlined experience for new users, making it easier to get started with Home Assistant.
Other Changes
Several other improvements have been made, including updates to Enphase Envoy, Shelly integration support for the Shelly Gas Valve addon, enhancements to the Reolink integration, separate damping factors for morning and evening in the Forecast Solar integration, and much more.
Home Assistant 2023.8
The Home Assistant release for August 2023 brings a range of new features and integrations.
The highlights include improved translations for all services, a new event entity that captures signals from physical events like button presses, and enhancements to the onboarding process for new users.
A particularly impressive addition is the integration with Opower, which allows users to pull energy usage data from several utility companies in the United States. This new integration supports a wide range of companies including PG&E, ComEd, BGE, and more.
The Assist feature has been expanded to add items to your shopping list, and there’s also a new service to generate images using OpenAI’s DALL-E. Moreover, wildcard support for sentence triggers has been introduced, allowing users to partially match a sentence and use the matched part in actions.
This release also includes a new condition selector for blueprints and a range of other minor changes.
The event entity, which simplifies the handling of events in Home Assistant, is now supported by HomeKit Devices, MQTT, and Philips Hue, with more integrations expected soon.
Full release notes for version 2023.8 can be found here.
Home Assistant 2023.7
Home Assistant 2023.7 introduces several significant features and improvements.
One of the most notable changes is the ability for services to respond with data, opening up new use cases and possibilities. This allows for bidirectional communication with devices and services, enabling interactions such as retrieving calendar events or generating notifications based on the response.
Other highlights of the release include enhancements to the entity dialog for locks, a new sentence trigger for automations based on voice commands, an Assist action for dashboard cards, support for image entities to display static images, and the addition of a self-sufficiency gauge in the energy dashboard.
Improvements have also been made to the user interface, with the introduction of copy-and-paste functionality for dashboards, the option to select the timezone for the interface, and refinements to the integrations dashboard. Additionally, unavailable automations and scripts are now displayed in the UI with error messages, making it easier to identify and fix issues.
Overall, this release brings numerous new features and quality-of-life improvements, enhancing Home Assistant’s functionality and user experience.
Home Assistant 2023.6
The release includes several exciting features and improvements for Home Assistant.
One notable addition is the ability to connect and use network storage, such as QNAP or Synology NAS, for media sources and backups.
The integrations dashboard and pages have been redesigned for a cleaner and more consistent experience.
The light entity dialog now includes favorite colors and shows the last changed information.
Other enhancements include copy and paste support in the automation editor, an upgrade to Python 3.11 for improved performance, Matter 1.1 implementation with stability fixes, updates to the Z-Wave integration, and the introduction of new entities for date, time, and date/time.
Home Assistant 2023.5
In this release, Home Assistant introduces several new features related to voice control.
It includes the ability to create custom voice assistants using assist pipelines, a voice assistant powered by Home Assistant Cloud, local text-to-speech using Piper, local speech-to-text using OpenAI Whisper, the Wyoming protocol and integration, and creating ESPHome-powered voice assistants.
The documentation and tutorials are available to help users get started with their own private voice assistant projects.
Additionally, there is a new “Voice assistants” menu item in the settings, allowing users to manage which entities are exposed to their voice assistants.
The entity settings dialog has also been improved, and users can now configure the LEDs of the Home Assistant Yellow device.
Other enhancements include support for webhooks using the GET HTTP method and new selectors for Assist pipelines and languages in automation or script Blueprints.
Full release notes for version 2023.5 can be found here.
Home Assistant 2023.4
Version 2023.4 of Home Assistant introduces new entity dialogs for alarm control panels, covers, and fans, providing a clean and neat UI experience. The cover entity dialogs adapt to the specific capabilities of the cover, such as controlling the position and tilt of blinds. Fan entity dialogs adjust their UI based on the number of speed steps available. Alarm control panel dialogs now support pin input for arming and disarming the alarm.
The Tile card in Home Assistant has gained two new features: Fan speed and Alarm mode. The fan speed feature displays buttons or a slider depending on the number of speed steps, while the alarm mode feature allows for a quick selection of different alarm states.
The release also includes the addition of Jinja2 macros, which allow users to centrally define and reuse logic in templates. Users can import and use these macros anywhere in Home Assistant, making template management more efficient.
Several new templating features have been added, including adjusted behaviour for relative_time and today_at functions, a new is_hidden_entity function to check if an entity is marked as hidden, an areas function to retrieve a list of all areas, support for break and continue statements in for loops, and the has_value function to filter entities based on their state availability.
The release includes advancements in the recorder database design, resulting in smaller database size, reduced disk usage and IO, improved CPU usage, quicker startup, faster history graphs and logbook, and reduced latency throughout the system. Home Assistant now also keeps history when renaming entities.
A new constant selector has been introduced for use in Blueprints, providing a fixed value when enabled. The device and entity filters on selectors have also been improved, allowing for multiple filter conditions.
Lastly, translation support has been extended to entities’ names, attributes, and attribute values in Home Assistant, with integrations explicitly adding support for translations.
Full release notes for version 2023.4 can be found here.
Home Assistant 2023.3
The latest release of Home Assistant includes several improvements and new features.
One of the highlights is the new restart dialog, inspired by the Windows XP computer turn-off screen, which includes a “Quick reload” option that calls all active integrations that support reloading YAML configuration on the fly.
The release also introduces the ability to ask for the state of things around your home with Assist, cleaner entity information dialogs, new dialogs for lights, switches, and siren entities, and sensor display precision settings.
Additionally, there is a new create automation dialog, and Thread & Matter support for Home Assistant has been extended and improved.
Full release notes for version 2023.3 can be found here.
Home Assistant 2023.2
Home Assistant has introduced new features to enhance user experience. The Assist feature enables users to control Home Assistant in their own language using natural language.
History cards now update live, allowing users to view real-time updates on power usage, and the history dashboard is also now live.
Sensor groups have been added, which provide more options to hide member entities and ignore sensors that are not currently in a numeric state.
Additionally, improvements have been made to the ESPHome add-on, which now communicates with Home Assistant to exchange encryption keys, provide update entities, and add a friendly name to ESPHome devices. The next major release of ESPHome (2023.2) will also support updating devices directly from Home Assistant.
Full release notes for version 2023.2 can be found here.
Home Assistant 2023.1
Home Assistant has declared 2023 as “The year of the voice” with the aim of enabling users to control the platform in their native language. The project has already begun collecting user intents in multiple languages via GitHub, and contributions are welcome.
Additionally, Home Assistant has added support for aliases for entity names via UI and Google Assistant.
The project has made progress in supporting Matter devices, and the Android app now supports pairing Matter devices.
Google Calendar integration now allows users to create new events and edit existing ones.
The translation for entity attributes has been improved to provide a better UI experience, and textual sensor entities can now provide a list of possible states that can be translated.
Full release notes for version 2023.1 can be found here.
