Roadmap 2024 Year-end Update: Full steam ahead!

For a long time, the ability to organize automation was at the top of our feature requests. Therefore, organizing automations was our first focus on the automation product area.

We gave users the ability to categorize automations, which makes the process of managing, editing, debugging, and searching automations much simpler. The categories are up to the users to define. For instance, I personally created categories per functionality such as “Smart Heating” or “Smart Cleaning”, and I particularly like my “Tests” categories where I keep all the automations that are currently being tested in my home.

On top of categories, users can now attach labels to automations, just like any other entity found in Home Assistant. Labels can be used to filter the automation list further, but what I am most interested in is the automation capabilities of the labels themselves. I saw some great ideas in the community, one of them that struck me was the idea to label some automation as “Not Guest Friendly” and deactivate them when a guest mode was activated. It’s nice to see labels as a tool to automate everything, even your automations themselves. 😀

All in all, Home Assistant truly made automations easier to organize in the past 6 months. We could still work on that, no opportunity is ever really done, but for the time being, we are considering this one done so that we can focus on bigger problems.

Automations are one of the cornerstones of Home Assistant, but it’s not an easy task to create them, especially if you are just starting out. There are a dozen things to know before you start and a dozen things to learn along the way.

Last year we redesigned our action picker and replaced a single option with an obscure name, “Call Service”, with hundreds of neatly categorized entries that we called “Actions”. This improved the automation creation process by quite a margin.

Today, the automation editor feels like it has progressed at two different speeds; our actions are easy to use, but our triggers and conditions are not. So we have begun bringing the same level of convenience that we previously brought to actions to our beloved triggers and conditions.

Our goal is to make our automation editor more approachable without losing what makes us unique: Its capabilities.

Blueprints are amazing, they represent what makes the Home Assistant community truly great: Sharing what you learned with others.

We are aware that using (and sharing) blueprints is not the most straightforward process today. For now, this is the next opportunity we want to tackle inside the automation stream.

Now that we’ve made customization of dashboards easier than ever, what’s next? We understand that it can be intimidating for users when they are faced with a blank slate. Some may be full of ideas on how they would like to fill their dashboards up, but some would prefer if Home Assistant came with something useful out-of-the-box. Therefore, we are now looking into making dashboards easier, even if you don’t know how to create one.

Case studies of many dashboards of our users

Over the past year, we have looked into dozens of case studies – dashboards created by many of you, from the most popular to the most pragmatic – and began to notice patterns in how our users organize their dashboards. Home Assistant is unique compared to other smart home platforms in that our dashboards are not just about controlling devices. After all, the perfect app is no app, as in, opening an app to control your light bulb is less convenient than simply flicking a light switch, or better yet, just automating it.

What we see our users have built instead are dashboards that help them keep track of information for their daily lives at a glance, and keep a birds-eye view of everything that is going on around their homes. For example, while you can automate Home Assistant to notify you when energy usage is too high, or you can ask Assist the current power usage, our dashboards shine at data visualization and its ability to tell you lots of information you need by just glancing at it.

Currently, our default dashboard simply dumps every single entity that a home has onto one page, making it wildly unmanageable as the smart home grows. While it can automatically group entities by areas, we have learned that areas are not the only way users look at their dashboard information. What we saw instead are dashboards that are specialized and focused on the functions of a home, such as energy usage, security and safety, and network status, on complex objects, such as a car and a 3D printer, or on information unrelated to the home itself, such as weather, neighborhood information, or even rocket launches. While we can simply show every entity by domain, we know we can make these function-focused dashboards much more useful by exposing insights by curating and juxtaposing information.

The inability to fine-tune access to Home Assistant by guests or other members of the family has been a pain point requested by many of our users. We want to investigate ways to mitigate this while improving the privacy of the household. Our research on what privacy means to users will hopefully bring more clarity to this before we start working on it.

Assist, our private voice assistant, received a lot of love over the last 6 months. Our first focus was to improve its capabilities out of the box, without needing to tinker with it. We added a lot of features that were heavily requested by the community, features that bring us one step closer to feature parity with our non-private competitors.

We brought area awareness, which allows you to target devices in the same area without mentioning the area (like “Close the curtains” or “Turn off the lights”). We brought floor support, which allows you to target devices across areas on the same floor; very useful for homes with an open floor design (for example “Turn on all lights on the first floor”).

Timers running on an S3 Box, with countdown text and a loading bar!

We implemented timers, allowing any voice assistant device to “ring” when a timer ends, including supporting the creation of multiple timers. You can also pause and resume them and add or remove time from them. You can combine commands with timers by giving a delayed command, allowing you to perform an action after a specific amount of time (like “Turn off the TV in 30 minutes)”.

We also brought the ability to control media via voice. Pausing or resuming them, controlling the volume, and going to the next track. This, combined with the area awareness capability mentioned above made for some really interesting short commands that work in a room with a TV playing or music streaming, such as “Pause”, “Resume” and “Next”.

So Assist is more capable, but what about getting started with Voice?

Voice is hard because it is a combination of great software and great hardware. Up until recently, we primarily focused on making the software experience great and relied on readily available hardware to power our voice assistants.

A teaser of our voice hardware

However, this is changing – over the past 6 months, we have built our own hardware! It will be the first voice assistant hardware built from the ground up to work with Home Assistant, fully open source (firmware and hardware), and it is going to be released very soon. It is truly the missing hardware piece to a more approachable voice experience in Home Assistant, and we cannot wait to see what you will build with it.

The more functionality we add to Assist, the more we reach its transactional limitations. Indeed, today, an interaction is one way, from a user (issuing a command) to Assist (acting on that command). We would like to improve this, allowing more conversational interactions with Assist.

In the future, Assist will be able to ask for clarifications before fulfilling a command, such as requesting the duration of a timer if it was not part of the original command or asking for confirmation before processing critical actions, such as unlocking all doors. On top of that, we would like to allow the conversation to start from Assist, and not from the user, such as greeting someone when they enter a room.
This pairs very well with LLM-based conversation agents due to their ability to retain context, but we will make sure these types of complex interactions are also possible with our default conversation agent.

Since our last roadmap update, we have expanded the product and design team working on the Home Assistant project, and we have hired our first ever dedicated user researcher!

While we are ramping up our user research pipeline, we have started working on investigating what privacy means to our users. Of the three Open Home values, privacy, choice, and sustainability, while we have a pretty solid understanding of choice and some understanding of sustainability, the idea of privacy can benefit from more clarity. We have interviewed a handful of users on this topic recently, and we can’t wait to show you what we have found.

Home Assistant Cloud, powered by our commercial partner Nabu Casa brings, to the many, the hard-to-reach features of Home Assistant usually reserved for power users with expensive hardware at home, with no compromise on privacy.

In recent months, the Nabu Casa team has been hard at work in bringing peace of mind to using Home Assistant. For the cloud backup feature, the Home Assistant team and the Nabu Casa team are now working closely together on a comprehensive revamp of backup integrations, to create an easy one-stop solution to a good backup strategy. We are also working to ensure users have a smooth onboarding for backing up to Home Assistant Cloud, as well as other third-party backup locations.

We remain committed to supporting open smart home standards, including Z-Wave Zigbee, Matter, and Thread, aligning with our Open Home mission to offer choice, privacy, and sustainability through locally controlled, cloud-independent devices.

In the past six months, we have made significant steps towards certifications, ensuring our open standards implementations are up to industry standards.

We hope that you can feel the results of all this work. Given the positive feedback we have received from our users, we will continue to follow our roadmap to work on the next product initiatives.

We will also start preparing for the roadmap for next year. It will have a new theme, and we would like to have our community be more involved in the process of its creation. Planning has already begun, and we hope to announce it at the next State of the Open Home. Last but not the least, please get in the comments and give us your feedback – we read it all!

See you next year!