Dec 23, 2022 4 min read

A voice for the Open Home

Christmas cookies by Jeffb3

It's time for our last installment of the year and soon time for a well deserved break for a couple of weeks. Time to relax, automate the holiday lights and use text-to-speech to trick the children.

It's been a great year for the Open Home and that wouldn't have been possible without you and the rest of our wonderful community. It's great to see everyone coming together, solving challenging problems and sharing their solutions with one another. Open source rocks. Local rocks. Privacy rocks.

Cheers to the Open Home, cheers to the community, and cheers to you! 🥂

– Paulus

2023: Home Assistant's Year of Voice

Looking back is great, but it's more exciting to see what is ahead. Over on the Home Assistant blog we announced that 2023 will be the year of voice. We have the modest goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Nabu Casa has hired Mike Hanson, creator of Rhasspy, to lead this effort.

Since the announcement 2 days ago, over 60 volunteers have signed up to help submit sentences to built out our home automation corpus in 92 different languages.

Home Assistant does Matter

Two weeks ago Home Assistant 2022.12 was released, the final release of the year. It was a big release with one important feature: Matter support.

You can't really use Matter yet, because there are no official Matter devices yet. The best way to try it out is to turn an ESP32 into a Matter device. Works with other Matter controllers too!

Putting it out this early helps to synchronize all the people involved in the development of Matter. The Android and iOS apps will receive updates soon to help you commission devices and more bugs are squashed in the Matter server every day.

There are some other cool features in this release too, like a local calendar and using Shelly devices as bluetooth proxies, so make sure to check out the release notes.

In past years we would skip the January release of Home Assistant. Last year it caused the February release to get so big that it started to break GitHub. So no skipping this year: the next release of Home Assistant will be on January 6.

See you on Mastodon

Enough of the Twitter home automation community has moved to Mastodon that we decided to also make a presence and will try to keep it up to date.

Come say hello to @homeassistant and @esphome! You will also find others like @frenck, @EverythingSmartHome, @JuanMTech and @balloob (me).

Shipping, shipping, shipping

More Home Assistant Yellow's are shipping. We're still on track to get the Home Assistant Yellow PoE Kit version to all the backers by January.

The first batch of Home Assistant SkyConnect has also been delivered. We expect the second batch to ship out in January with most of our distributors taking pre-orders.

Both these devices will soon be able to add a Thread Border Router to your Home Assistant instance and unlock the full potential of Matter.

Supporting the Open Home

We get asked quite often how to support our work. The answer is to subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa. There are monthly and annual plans and no lock-ins.

Nabu Casa was founded by me, Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, and it exists to further develop out the Open Home. Nabu Casa employees lead the work on Home Assistant, ESPHome, Z-Wave JS, Zigpy (Zigbee in HA), Matter Server and soon also voice.