If there is one thing I really like about Home Assistant, it is the communication! As we have seen, at the beginning of each month we are entitled to a long presentation of all the new features that have arrived with the monthly update. It's a bit like Christmas at the beginning of each month :) And for those who are impatient, the developers have also published their roadmap, that is to say their roadmap for the next developments to come. Is that making your mouth water? Well, let's find out a little more in detail!
The mission of the Home Assistant project is to become the best smart home platform that embodies the vision of the open home (privacy, choice, sustainability), powered by a community of free software users.
A smart home platform must allow users to observe, control, automate and anticipate the key functions of a home, which ensures security, comfort, convenience, customization and accessibility for its residents.
The project’s developers found that while Home Assistant is a powerful platform for people who value privacy and customization, adoption within their homes is a different story. Users have often gone to great lengths to make Home Assistant easier to use for other members of their household, either by using another app as the user interface or by hiding all visible traces of the platform. They call adoption of the home assistant by other members of the household the “home approval factor.”
So, in the upcoming roadmap for Home Assistant, the developers are going to focus on just that: making Home Assistant household-approved. This can be done by improving the touchpoints that all members of the household will interact with, such as automations, dashboards, and voice assistants, while maintaining the power and depth of the platform for users and admins. Ultimately, the goal is for Home Assistant to be much more user-friendly. This will affect several areas.
Dashboards
As we’ve seen in the last few updates, the developers have already been hard at work improving the dashboards.
But they’re planning to make the experience even better for all users.
- Current priority : Making dashboard customization easy and intuitive. With the new Sections view layout, better tile cards, and drag-and-drop being very well received, the developers have recently started their work to make dashboard customization easy and intuitive. They aim to implement an intuitive and organized grid system for dashboards. They rely on community contributions to update the current maps to fit the grid system.
- Next priority : Make the default dashboards more useful and relevant. The current default dashboard gives users two choices: Either list all the entities the system is connected to, or start from scratch. With dashboard templates, it will be possible to make the default dashboards more useful than that. Here too, they rely on user contributions to optimize them so that they display the most relevant information from the start.
- Next priority : Improve privacy for users, guests, and the public. The inability to fine-tune access to Home Assistant by guests or other family members has been a major concern raised by many users. Developers want to explore ways to mitigate this while improving privacy for family members.
Voice Assistants
Since last year, Home Assistant has been building a voice assistant framework from scratch with the Year of Voice initiative. Now that the infrastructure is in place, it’s important to ensure that it’s usable by everyone (before Alexa and Google Assistant disappear?).
- Current Priority 1 : Improve assistive capabilities out of the box. Research has shown that users are most interested in improving Assist’s out-of-the-box capabilities, such as timers, reminders, and music controls.
- Priority 2 : Make it easier to get started with the assistant. Currently, there are several things you need to install or configure to get started with voice. It’s necessary to make it easy to install and get started with the assistant. There are already some good hardware choices to get started with voice, but they are looking into building their own voice satellite hardware to create a more plug-and-play experience!
Automations
Automation is one of the cornerstones of home automation. The ability to automate your home to do what you expect when you expect it to do is both fascinating and extremely rewarding for users of all experience levels. Today, Home Assistant’s automation engine is one of the most powerful on the market. However, this comes at a cost: it’s not the easiest to use.
- Current Priority 1 : Make automations easier to organize. As users grow their smart home, they create more automations. Automations are listed in a large table and can be easily disorganized as they grow. Earlier this year, developers made significant progress on improving automation organization, including labels, filters, and categories, which in turn made not only automations easier to organize, but nearly every table in Home Assistant settings.
- Current Priority 2 : Make automations easier to create. While they made progress earlier this year in making automations easier to create, developers need to go even further, with a full product development cycle of research, discovery, ideation, and validation to confidently make design and implementation decisions. Today, many seemingly simple automations can be too complex to create and debug, so there is plenty of room for improvement.
Research
To make informed product decisions, developers need to base their work on solid research. That’s why they have developed research capabilities, both in terms of user research and technology research.
User Research
For everyone in the community to make the right product, design, and engineering decisions, it’s necessary to have a clear understanding of who Home Assistant users really are. Last year, the team did some initial research, mostly focused on dashboards. This year, they want to get the big picture by conducting a full foundational user study.
Next, on the three values ofOpen Home (privacy, choice, and sustainability): they have a pretty solid understanding of choice and some understanding of sustainability. But the idea of privacy could use more clarity. Developers need a better understanding of what privacy really means for a home and its residents.
Technology Research (R&D)
Large language models (LLMs) are all the rage, but that’s not why Home Assistant is exploring them. They can solve some very interesting problems in the home, and with the amount of data that users collect in their history, there is still a lot of untapped power in Home Assistant to make it THE smart home platform for AI.
To help AI make better decisions, you need to better understand the context of each device. To do this, you need to refine the information architecture. For example, developers recently rolled out the notion of floors to help the home assistant better understand your home. This is no small feat, but it could be essential to implementing better voice technology or even AI in the home.
Home Assistant Cloud: Peace of Mind
Home Assistant Cloud, developed by business partner Nabu Casa, brings hard-to-access Home Assistant features that are typically reserved for power users with expensive hardware at home to the masses, without compromising privacy.
Today, Home Assistant Cloud provides the easiest and most secure way to access your Home Assistant instance anywhere in the world and connect to third-party cloud-connected voice assistants, such as offerings from Google and Alexa. The latest addition to Cloud is the ability to offload resource-intensive tasks like text-to-speech and speech synthesis. This allows users to have energy-efficient hardware in their homes, such as the Home Assistant Green, which consumes three watts and performs tasks typically reserved for 100-watt home servers.
For the next phase of Home Assistant Cloud, the plan is to continue developing features that adhere to the mission, as outlined above. The theme of upcoming initiatives revolves around user peace of mind:
- Current Priority : Strengthening Security. The developers want to strengthen security, providing more control for remote access and two-factor authentication (2FA) for the Nabu Casa account.
- Next Priority : Encrypted Cloud Backup. This would allow users to have a more resilient installation of Home Assistant, so that if your instance completely fails, it can be restored from the cloud.
- Later Priority : Cloud Monitoring. If your Home Assistant instance goes down, the system will be able to detect it and send an email notification. This will allow you to monitor your downtime and hopefully prevent future downtime, to the delight of your entire family ?.
Open Standards: “Certified Quality”
Home Assistant developers believe that open standards are essential to providing choices for the future of the open home, which is why they have put a lot of effort into supporting current and emerging standards. They allow manufacturers to ensure broad compatibility, but also give users peace of mind by ensuring the longevity of their devices.
All teams are currently working hard on certification, to ensure that all implementations of open standards are compliant with industry standards.
ZigBee
For Zigbee, the system already has a well-established hardware solution with the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 (formerly known as SkyConnect). Developers continue to contribute code and refine ZHA and Zigpy, the software that powers Zigbee in Home Assistant.
Matter
- Current Priority 1 : Certification. Matter is served by the Matter server, which evolves with the standard, and Home Assistant continues to be the first home automation system to adopt the latest Matter standards. The Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 hardware also supports the standard with support for Matter over Thread.
- Current Priority 2 : Device Commissioning. There are still some big challenges, like commissioning the devices, which is currently too complex, and they are working with the industry to improve it.
Z-Wave
- Current Priority : Certification. This year, Home Assistant has made several important announcements regarding its support for Z-Wave. In particular, HA joined the Z-Wave Alliance in February and the team has been working on improving the Z-Wave JS software.
- Next priority : Connecting the home assistant hardware to Z-Wave. To make the user experience of this protocol as seamless as possible, HA wants to build its own Z-Wave key to connect devices to Home Assistant. This new Z-Wave key will join the Home Assistant Connect family of products.
As you can see, the teams working behind Home Assistant still have great projects in progress!
Source: Official Roadmap
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