How to take back your voice
Welcome to the October edition of the Open Home Foundation newsletter, the place to learn about the latest and greatest things for your smart home that improve its privacy, choice, and sustainability.
The Open Home newsletter is written by Paulus Schoutsen – President of the Open Home Foundation, and founder of Home Assistant. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here!
From the devices you talk to in your home, to Community Day meetups where you can have your say in person, the Open Home Foundation wants you to be heard. So this issue I’m focusing on voice, kicking off with some cool community projects that repurpose old assistants for good…
How to take back your voice
Imagine building a tiny board that frees a first-generation Home Mini from Google, asking for $8,000 crowdfunding to make it, and ending up with 16 times that. It’s what happened to Imre Laszlo and MiciMike: $132,614 and counting 🚀
I’m stoked for Imre (we featured MiciMike a few months back). But what really excites me is the spirit of innovation those numbers suggest. The people who backed the project aren’t giving up on voice assistants – they’re giving up on Big Tech’s version of them.
Your device, their rules
The trouble with those assistants is you’re never really in control. The company decides how yours works, what it can do, and when it’s time to move on. Recent examples include Google ending production of Nest Mini and Audio in favor of newer speakers, and Amazon pushing Alexa+ onto Prime members’ devices, even after they’d declined the upgrade.
Community to the rescue!
The good news is our community has found plenty of ways to bring these devices into Home Assistant, where you always have the final say on where your words go. Judging by the projects popping up, Amazon’s Echo is a popular test subject, and as usual, your ingenuity never fails to amaze me. A few of my favorites:
- LocalDot: Give a third-generation Echo Dot a brain transplant with Alessandro Alfonzetti’s open mainboard. Launching soon on Crowd Supply.
- Kiosk Satellite: Link a second-generation Echo Dot with your other devices for hands-free intercom calls between rooms.
- EchoMuse: Turn a second-generation Echo Dot into a local voice assistant and music player.
- overdub: Hand the Dot’s action button to Home Assistant while Alexa keeps running, if you’re not ready to say goodbye just yet.
- TECHO5: Hack the Echo Show’s whole operating system and make it a local Home Assistant voice satellite, touchscreen and all.
If you don’t know where to start, HuskerMinion, the developer behind TECHO5, has built an Echo project comparison tool to keep track. Pick your device, filter by the features you need, and find your build.
I hope these inspire you to dig out that old assistant, crack it open, and make it work for you. And if you’d rather skip the screwdriver, there’s always Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition!
What’s next for voice...
Our community members aren’t the only ones who’ve been busy with voice 👀 You may have heard whispers that the team at Apollo Automation are working on a speaker dock for the Voice Preview Edition… and we can give you a sneak peek today (spoiler alert: it’s looking pretty neat).
And for anyone using Home Assistant Link (the new name for Home Assistant Cloud, more on this below 👇), Nabu Casa is testing a new speech-to-text engine that copes better with accents, background noise, and languages other than English.
When smart home brands change hands
There have been some big stories in the smart home business world lately, with two hitting particularly close to home. First Schneider Electric is set to take over Shelly early next year, second Jasco has acquired Zooz. As Works with Home Assistant partners, Jasco, Shelly, and Zooz got where they are today by engaging with the community and building for an open ecosystem. We respect them for that.
But acquisitions come with change, and that makes people nervous. Both Shelly and Zooz have been quick to offer reassurance. Shelly says Schneider intends to keep its headquarters and workforce in Bulgaria for at least three years after the deal, while Zooz confirmed on Discord that its manufacturing facility is unchanged, and its technical and support teams are transitioning to Jasco. As long as they continue to meet the program’s requirements, Jasco, Shelly and Zooz devices will keep their Works with Home Assistant certification.
Stepping back however, there’s a wider trend we’re wary of. Across tech – not just in the smart home space – smaller companies are being folded into bigger ones. On paper, this means more resources, which can be a good thing. In practice, it often comes with new priorities, and the things that people loved about a brand and its products don’t always survive the move.
What does this mean for the foundation? We can’t control who buys what. But we can make sure our own projects are never on the table. Brands can be bought and sold – that’s business. Ours can’t, because we created a non-profit foundation to protect them. The Open Home is not for sale.
Why we kicked cloud to the curb
Big Tech turned “cloud” into a dirty word. Price hikes, data harvesting, and outages have nothing to do with Nabu Casa’s optional Home Assistant Cloud service, and everything to do with what’s wrong with the cloud today. So it’s being renamed to Home Assistant Link, and I sat down with Jennifer from The Verge to explain why.
New from the Open Home Foundation
Things move fast around here: click the links to discover what’s new across our projects this month.
✅ ESPHome 2026.10.0: Native ESP8266 builds and compressed updates
✅ Home Assistant 2026.10: You are here – a pin-sharp new OpenStreetMap-based map
Coming soon: What the heck?!: While our releases focus on all that’s shiny and new, we also want to hear about what’s not working so well – so we’ll be asking you (and the people you live with) just that throughout November, our month of What the heck?! Stay tuned for more details…
LEDVANCE joins Works with Home Assistant
A whopping 116 devices have been added to the program this month, thanks to our newest Works with Home Assistant partner LEDVANCE. The certified range includes filament-style bulbs, outdoor floodlights, and everything in between. Matter-compatible and built to work over Wi-Fi, the devices are local, cloud-free, and sure to spark inspiration 💡 Find out more on our blog.
Community meetups
Community Day 2026 is coming! Are you ready?
The mother of all meetups is on November 7: Community Day! We want to make this year’s global celebration of privacy, choice, and sustainability in smart homes the biggest yet – so if you want to get to know fellow open source fans near you, join a meetup today: there are 93 and counting to choose from.
If your area’s not represented, don’t worry there’s still time to organize an event of your own – and we’ll support you in setting it up! Remember, nobody cares whether you’ve contributed a core integration, simply renamed a light entity, or have only just started using Home Assistant, ESPHome, or Music Assistant: everyone’s welcome, across all our projects 💙
Your community needs you!
There are a few Community Day meetups planned that could do with more attendees, so if you live near any of these places, sign up today:
🇺🇸 Houston, Texas, USA
🇲🇽 Monterrey, Mexico
🇩🇪 Unna, Germany
🇮🇹 Pordenone, Italy
🇪🇬 Cairo, Egypt
Open to chat at IFA
Our projects only exist thanks to the people who use, build, and improve them, so who better to tell the world what they’re all about than you? That’s why eight community volunteers gave their time to help out at our first-ever booth at IFA, Berlin’s international consumer tech show. After last month’s round-up, we wanted to give a voice to the people who made it such a success. Here’s what they told us.
Catching a Z-Wave in Boca Raton
If you need evidence that not all meetups have to be planned months in advance, take a look at this. While I was at the Z-Wave Alliance Summit in Boca Raton, Florida, we organized an impromptu Home Assistant meetup with the local community, where Agnes and Bartek from Zooz also stopped by. We had great conversations about the future of the smart home, did a Sendspin demo with everyone in the room (which went perfectly 👌), and had a great evening in general. Thanks to Doug Roberson from Shelly for hosting us!
Obrigado, Lisbon!
The sun set on a busy summer of events at our Lisbon meetup on September 23, hosted by the Open Home Foundation as part of our annual Summit – and I’m still buzzing. Our community members and commercial partners joined our team at Impact Hub Penha for food and drinks, great conversation, even better project ideas, and a whole lot of swag. More than 100 of you signed up, and it’s fair to say we all had a blast. Thank you, Lisbon, and until next time!
Help us build the Open Home
Good news! After a short break, the Open Home Foundation store is back up and running (with more improvements and merch designs planned very soon 👀).
Shopping our store is not the only way to join our fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes:
Support our work
Subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud or buy official Home Assistant or ESPHome products from our commercial partners.
Share your skills
Contribute code, translations, documentation, or designs to any of our projects – or sponsor a maintainer directly on GitHub or Ko-Fi.
In other news...
Yes, you DO own the glass!
If you’re still recovering from my rant about LG TVs last month (not sure I have TBH), then this should make you feel better. Glasshouse is an open source project for rooted LG TVs with the tagline “Own the glass” (chef’s kiss). Run it locally on your TV to see whether LG’s content-recognition engine is sampling your screen, switch off most of its data agreements, and block ad and telemetry endpoints. It also bridges your TV to Home Assistant, so your remote can control the rest of your smart home. It’s the reply to LG I was dreaming of.
Update: One eagle-eyed Reddit user reports their LG TV now asks them to accept two new mandatory agreements before they can use it fully: one for automatic content recognition, and one for voice capture. If true, LG has more explaining to do...
The proof is in the Pi
Raspberry Pi has shared how it’s working towards net zero at its UK office in Cambridge, and I’m delighted Home Assistant has a part to play. Using Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with Home Assistant and Emporia clamps, the team monitors every breaker in the building, with a live diagram showing where each kWh flows. After Hortus Botanicus in July, it’s great to see more organizations putting Home Assistant to work for the common good 🙌
Weber goes cold turkey on the June Oven
Another day, another smart device burned. In 2021 Weber bought smart oven maker June, and a few weeks ago shut down the cloud servers for the June Oven. Users have lost remote control, live camera viewing, and software updates, and support for repairs or parts is gone too. Sure, the oven still cooks, but that’s little consolation if you’ve forked out up to $1,500 for its smart features. To rub salt in the wound, Weber could’ve open-sourced the app, but won’t, because the IP is still used in its other products.
My view on HomeView
Nearly two years later than planned, Apple has finally unveiled HomeView, a $299 smart home display built to be controlled mainly by voice. My verdict so far? If you use the Apple Home ecosystem, it looks great for smart home control. Most importantly, it works with Home Assistant – just bring your devices along with our HomeKit Bridge ✅ I also spotted Safari in a screenshot, so a Home Assistant dashboard might not be out of the question... But if you’d rather not rely on Big Tech for a voice, we’ve given plenty of alternatives in this issue.
Dude, where’s my car?
If you don’t know, a third-party tracking company might. In a recent study by Northeastern University and Consumer Reports, a team of researchers analyzed 21 vehicles from 19 brands sold in the US, along with their companion apps. The results? Every single car transmitted data to a third-party domain. Consumer Reports has the full story.
Break free from Big Tech this month
October may be nearly over, but there’s still time to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s second annual Opt Out October. Resisting the tech giants’ grip on the smart home industry can seem tough at times, but EFF’s resources make it feel doable. There’s guidance on how to stop AI training on your data, ditch social media and software made by Big Tech, and opt out of major operating systems. It isn’t about disconnecting altogether: it’s about finding alternatives that align with your values. It’s great to see EFF shares ours!
Community highlights
In a bid to get his family to use his Home Assistant dashboard more, Anton Frolov hired an illustrator to draw their house and turned it into a living, animated dashboard – flickering stove and all 🔥
Another artistic idea: u/xDaftTurtle turned their security camera microphones into a local bird identifier with BirdNET-Go, then displayed the results as 1800s specimen prints on e-ink frames 🦜
Note: We’d love to know more about wildlife-related projects like this for our speaker research program. If you have something similar to share, email community@openhomefoundation.org
u/Nite01007 built real-life Mrs Weasley’s clock in Home Assistant to show where family members are at a glance – and if their phone battery drops below 10% while they’re out, they’re officially in Mortal Peril 🪄
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