Our first Home Assistant Community Day will be on May 24th this year 🎉, and with a month to go, here is all the information you need to take part.

The community will be leading meetups across the globe, so find your nearest event and register now! They’re all free and will be full of smart people with smart homes. If you don’t see your city on this list, we’re encouraging the community to host their own meetups, so keep reading to learn more.

Our biggest party yet

I’m sure you’re all wondering, “Missy, what is a Community Day?”. In its simplest form, it’s a single day in which community members around the world set up local meetups with each other. That leaves a lot open, though. Where do you sign up? How do you host your own meetup? How many people should show up? Where’s the best place to hold a meetup? …that’s a lot of questions! 😳 Luckily, I have all the answers 😉.

We’re excited to announce that Reolink is the latest partner to join the Works with Home Assistant program.

Just recently, we had blinds join the program, and now we have Reolink bringing the first certified cameras and doorbells. Reolink has certified a wide range of their devices including battery-powered and wired options, as well as devices with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and Wi-Fi connectivity.

When someone in the Home Assistant community asks for camera recommendations, Reolink often tops the list. This strong reputation is well-earned, as they prioritize local control, don’t require cloud connectivity for their advanced features, and support open protocols whenever possible.

The State of the Open Home 2025 has wrapped, and a big thanks to everyone who tuned in to the live stream! If you missed it, please check out the recording, it’s a slick production and definitely the best way to take it all in. For those who would rather read about all the updates and announcements, we’ve also got you covered with this blog.

It was an over 2-hour event, and if you need a shorter summary than this blog, here’s my best attempt 😅:

For all the juicy details, keep reading!

Home Assistant 2025.4! 🎉

It’s April 2nd, so this is definitely not an April Fool’s joke! 😃

But before diving into this month’s release, I want to quickly highlight something you might have missed—something I’m extremely excited about:

The State of the Open Home 2025!

Yes, you read that right! On Saturday, April 12th, 2025, we’ll be streaming a big live event on YouTube, sharing our vision for the Open Home Foundation, including the future of Home Assistant. Don’t miss it!

Alright, back to the release! As I was saying, it’s April already, and we have another fantastic release lined up for you.

The big news is the introduction of our new experimental Areas dashboard, which might evolve to become the default dashboard in the future. If you’re like me—not really a UI-oriented person—you’re going to love this one! 🤩

My personal absolute favorite feature this month is something I’ve dreamed of ever since we started working on voice assistants: the ability for your assistant to start a conversation proactively! This is a game changer—no other voice assistant on the market can do this! I’m going to have so much fun with this. 😃

If you’re a power user who loves templates, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered too! This release ships with a bunch of new template functions, making your life a lot easier.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

We’re excited to announce the latest partner to join the Works with Home Assistant program is Motionblinds! And if you’re wondering what type of products they provide, the clue really is in the name!

Motionblinds is the first Works with Home Assistant partner to certify smart window blinds. This brings us closer to a future where you can build a smart home exclusively with certified devices that give the best possible experience with Home Assistant.  Smart blinds integrated with Home Assistant unlock powerful automations, such as blinds opening when you get home, or closing sun-facing blinds on warmer days to keep your home cool.

Update: It happened and was great! Read the biggest highlights here or watch the full recording.

🚨On April 12th, we’re going live with this year’s State of the Open Home - our annual recap of the previous year and look ahead to the next. Just like past years, this live stream will be packed with awesome announcements, updates, and cool community highlights. (Got 11 hours to spare? Check out our last 5 State of live streams!)

This marks a full year since the founding of the Open Home Foundation and Home Assistant becoming part of the foundation. We’ll be taking a look back at what has been a very big year, and using this time to give you some big updates. These will include new projects becoming a part of the foundation 🚀, new supporters 🎉, and what’s in store for our Works with Home Assistant program 🤝.

We’ll also be highlighting some of the big findings of our 2024 Home Assistant survey, where over 8,500 of you told us about yourself, your homes, and how you use Home Assistant. We’ll also announce Home Assistant’s 2025 roadmap, and how your feedback is shaping the future of the Open Home.

🔔 Be sure to click to get notified when it starts (Saturday, April 12 - 18:00 GMT / 20:00 CEST / 14:00 EDT / 11:00 PDT), and we can’t wait to see you in the comments!

Matter in Home Assistant has been officially certified! 🎉 The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has certified Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation Matter Server, the first open-source project to receive this certification. Certification is proof that open source projects can sit among, or even above, big tech when it comes to providing the best smart home experience.

Home Assistant, as part of the Open Home Foundation, strongly believes in open standards. They embody our values of choice, privacy, and sustainability in the smart home. When a standard is well supported, consumers get access to a wide range of smart home devices that should work far into the future, which is great for sustainability. Best of all, they work locally, keeping your smart home data in your home.

All these benefits led us to include open standards certification in our roadmap. Home Assistant’s implementations of Matter, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are already industry-leading, so it only makes sense to clearly signal and give users peace of mind that we provide true compatibility. This most recent certification is not just big for Home Assistant, but read on to see how it also helps any open source project looking to use Matter.

Home Assistant 2025.3! 🎉

But! Before I dive into the release, let me quickly catch you up on things you might have missed. There is a lot of cool stuff happening lately!

We had a live stream about Assist: Voice chapter 9! Here we announced Speech-to-Phrase, a voice recognition technology that is blazing fast and super accurate, even on a Raspberry Pi! 🚀

I’m also super stoked about the announcement that Apollo Automation has joined the Works with Home Assistant program 🥰

And our friends at Music Assistant have shipped their next big hit! With awesome new features like Spotify Connect, Assist optimization, an equalizer, and podcast & audiobook support. 🎶

Great stuff, right? But this release today is also packed with amazing things!

After a few releases focusing on backups, we are back with a release packed with new features and improvements, mostly focusing on dashboards! 🤩

The new abilities, the tile card’s fine-tuning, and the dashboard view’s new headers are really cool; I can’t wait to see screenshots of your dashboards with these new features! 📸

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Over the past several months, Music Assistant has been hitting all the right notes with new features, greater stability, and a crescendo of contributors who keep pushing the project forward. If you’re unfamiliar with Music Assistant, it allows you to merge your libraries from leading audio streaming providers and local files, letting you play them on the most popular smart speakers. Since our last update, Music Assistant has had a couple of big releases, but our most recent might just be our platinum record 💿, with a lot of new functionality coming in version 2.4. In case you’ve missed the last few updates, here are the biggest additions.

Table of contents

• Optimized for Assist
• External audio & Spotify Connect
• Podcasts & Audiobooks
• More players and providers
• Equalizer control & features
• Home Assistant improvements
• More stable streaming
• Get Music Assistant 2.4 today!

Apollo Automation has joined the Works with Home Assistant program. Certifying three of their newest devices, including their community favorite presence and air quality multisensors, giving users the best possible experience when using these devices with Home Assistant.

Notably, these are the first ESPHome-based devices to receive Works with Home Assistant certification. Apollo is one of the first movers in an important trend that we’re very excited about: Home Assistant community members turning their open projects into viable businesses that support a thriving Open Home ecosystem.