2026.5.1

Assist - Talk to your smart home with Home Assistant

Assist is the voice assistant built into Home Assistant. It lets you control your smart home with natural language, and it can run fully on your own hardware, so your voice commands stay private. Assist works in the Home Assistant companion app, on dedicated voice hardware like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, and on devices you build yourself with ESPHome.

Look for the Assist icon Assist icon at the top right of your dashboard to try it out right away.

Assist is built on an open voice foundation and powered by knowledge contributed by our community. It can work locally or, if you prefer, use one of the latest large language models to handle more conversational requests.

Getting started

When you configure voice assistant hardware made for Home Assistant, it will use a wizard to help you configure your system and get started to use voice.

Our recommended voice assistant hardware is the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition.

In case your hardware does not support our wizard, do not worry. Here are two detailed guides based on how you plan to process your voice (Locally, or using Home Assistant Cloud voice services)

Expand and experiment

Once your setup is up and running and you follow the best practices, check all the possibilities we found for Expanding your Assist setup, and further experiment with different setups like wake words. Do you want to talk to Super Mario? Or another figure? If you want Assist to respond in a fun way, you can create an assistant with an AI personality.

To further improve your setup, try building other voice assistant satellite devices that allow you to add Assist with wake words to all your rooms:

  • Enable wake word detection on your Android phone to activate Assist hands-free by saying “Hey Jarvis” or “Hey Nabu”, even when your phone is locked.

  • You can use ESPHome to create your own awesome voice assistant satellites based on inexpensive ESP32 microcontrollers, like @piitaya did with his 3D-printed R5 droid. Follow our tutorial to create your own for just $13.

  • Another alternative voice satellite solution is the experimental Linux-Voice-Assistant project. It allows you to build a Linux-based voice assistant smart speaker that runs on any x64 or ARM64 hardware capable of handling local, on-device audio processing. This approach provides greater flexibility for customization. Because it runs on a full Linux system, it also gives you access to significantly more local computing resources for additional features and other integrations on the same satellite.

  • If you are interested in a voice assistant that is not always listening, consider using Assist on an analog phone. It will only listen when you pick up the horn, and the responses are for your ears only. Follow our tutorial to create your own analog phone voice assistant.

Supported languages and sentences

Assist aims to support more languages than other voice assistants, but this is still a work in progress, and we need your help.

Check supported languages here
Local
Not supported
Needs more work
Usable
Fully supported
Home Assistant Cloud
Not supported
Needs more work
Usable
Fully supported

Assist already supports a wide range of languages. Use the built-in sentences to control entities and areas, or create your own sentences.

Did Assist not understand your sentence? Contribute them.

Assist was introduced in Home Assistant 2023.2.

Related topics

Related links