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 2023.9
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.
