The April 2025 update of Home Assistant has just been deployed, bringing with it an array of exciting new features that will significantly enhance your smart home experience. Between the new experimental room-based dashboard, voice improvements, and new features for advanced users, this 2025.4 release is set to be a major milestone in the evolution of the platform. Let's dive together into the details of this update that deserves your full attention.
A game-changing room-based dashboard
The star attraction of this update is undoubtedly the new experimental room-based dashboard. The Home Assistant team continues its effort to make the platform more accessible and intuitive, and this new dashboard is a perfect illustration of that.
Until now, the default dashboard merely listed entities grouped by room or domain. A simple approach, but it quickly showed its limitations as your smart home setup expanded. With this new dashboard, no more blank pages to fill in – the system automatically generates a ready-to-use interface based on the rooms you have configured in your home.
Each room now has its own dedicated page, providing a clear and organized view of the devices located there. Entities such as lights, shutters, cameras, and more are automatically grouped by domain, making them easier to locate. At the top of each room page, temperature and humidity badges quickly indicate comfort levels, which you can configure in the room settings.
The overview page gathers all your rooms in one place, with each section corresponding to a room in your home. As with the room pages, you can rearrange, show, or hide areas according to your preferences.
To enjoy this new experience, it is essential to organize your devices by room. If you haven't done this yet, now is the perfect time to start. To activate the room-based dashboard, go to Settings > Dashboards, select Add a dashboard at the bottom right, then choose the Rooms (experimental) option in the dialog box.
However, be cautious, as its name suggests, this feature is still experimental. It may evolve and not always work as expected. The Home Assistant team is also asking for your feedback to improve it. Even if you have already created the perfect dashboard for your home, don't hesitate to try it out and share your experience!
What time is it? A new card to find out!
It's been a while since we had a new card, and this update brings us a very simple yet incredibly useful one: the Clock card. As its name suggests, it displays the current time, which may seem basic but proves very practical for dashboards displayed on wall tablets or dedicated screens.
This card offers several customization options: you can adjust the size of the clock, set the time zone, display seconds in addition to hours and minutes, and choose between a 12 or 24-hour format. A small addition that is pleasing and fills a long-standing gap in the Home Assistant ecosystem.
Voice improvements that make a difference
The year of voice may be behind us, but the Home Assistant team continues to improve the voice experience. This update brings several enhancements that make interacting with your smart home even more natural.
A voice assistant that takes the initiative
The most revolutionary feature of this update is undoubtedly your voice assistant's ability to start a conversation proactively. Imagine: you left the garage door open, and a few minutes later, your assistant says, “Hey, I've noticed that you left the garage door open, would you like me to close it for you?” You simply respond “yes” or “no,” and that's it!
Or, after a long day at work, you come home and your assistant warmly welcomes you: “Welcome home! I hope you had a good day. Would you like to listen to the news or enjoy some music?”
This feature opens up a world of possibilities for voice automation. Currently, this capability is only available with LLM integrations, but the team is exploring other use cases where it could be useful.
A small clever detail: a brief pre-announcement sound is played just before the conversation starts. This small notification prevents your assistant from surprising someone by suddenly speaking out of nowhere, thus avoiding shocks! You could even use custom sounds depending on the scenario – like the sound of a doorbell for visitors or a train station jingle when your morning commute is delayed, giving you more time to grab that coffee before you leave.
More natural conversations with LLMs
Have you ever tried having a conversation with your voice assistant connected to an LLM like ChatGPT? It's fun, but having to say “Ok Nabu” every time you respond to a question from the assistant can really slow things down.
This update introduces the possibility of having a continuous conversation with LLMs. If the LLM asks you a question, the system will detect it and maintain the conversation without you having to repeat “Ok Nabu.” A much more natural way to interact with your voice assistant, and it works with all LLMs supported by Home Assistant.
A smarter voice assistant
If you set up a device compatible with the Home Assistant voice assistant, such as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, you will be guided through the setup of your voice assistant, and this experience has been greatly improved in this version.
As the voice experience now offers more choices, including local options like Speech-to-Phrase, the team wanted to ensure that you could make the right choice for your use case. The assistant will help you make a more informed decision based on your language, desired features, and device capabilities, ensuring the best possible experience with your voice assistant.
Simplified restore during initial setup
If you are a Home Assistant Cloud user via Nabu Casa, you already know that you can back up your configuration to the cloud. But what happens if your hardware fails or if you migrate to a new Home Assistant Green?
Starting with this version, you can restore your backup directly from Home Assistant Cloud during the initial setup process of your new Home Assistant installation. This means you can be up and running with your new installation in no time, with all your settings, automations, and integrations restored from your backup.
It's a bit like restoring your iPhone from an iCloud backup when you buy a new phone – everything is there, exactly as you left it. A feature that will significantly simplify life for those who need to migrate their Home Assistant setup to new hardware.
Simpler variables in automations
If you are an advanced user who uses variables in your automations and scripts, you will love this new feature. The variables action is no longer limited to local scopes; it can now also update the value of a variable in external scopes. If the variable was not previously defined, it will be created in the upper-level scope (script execution).
In simple terms, this means that if you define a variable in one action, it will be accessible in all subsequent actions, regardless of their nesting level. From a programming perspective, an automation or script execution can be considered a single function scope for the variables it contains.
If you have automations or scripts that use the same variable name in different (previously isolated) scopes, you will need to update them: just use distinct variable names to avoid any conflict.
A device hierarchy for energy management
This update also introduces the ability to create a hierarchy in devices at the energy management dashboard level. This means you can now create a parent-child relationship between the devices in your energy configuration.
For example, imagine having a circuit breaker that monitors the total energy consumption of a circuit but also separately tracks the individual devices connected to that circuit. Previously, Home Assistant could double count that consumption. Now, it understands these relationships and accurately displays the consumption of each device without duplication.
In the given example, the water heater is a child of the heat pump. Both report their energy consumption separately, but the water heater's consumption is also included in the total reported by the heat pump. With device hierarchy enabled, Home Assistant correctly displays the consumption of each device.
New integrations and improvements
As always, this update brings a number of new integrations and improvements to existing integrations. Among the new integrations are:
- Bosch Alarm: Control and monitor your Bosch intrusion alarm systems/control panels.
- Remote calendar: Add remote calendar URLs as a calendar in Home Assistant.
- Pterodactyl: Control and monitor your Pterodactyl game server management panel.
On the improvements side, the OpenAI conversation integration now has a new action for generating content, and it can now search the web! The Google AI conversation integration has also gained the ability to search the web.
The SmartThings integration has received numerous enhancements, including support for firmware updates via Home Assistant, support for event entities, PM0.1 sensors, washing machine rinse cycle settings, support for TVs and media players, and better device management.
Conclusion
The Home Assistant 2025.4 update brings an impressive array of new features and improvements that make the platform even more powerful and user-friendly. The new room-based dashboard, though still experimental, shows the direction Home Assistant is taking to make smart home technology more accessible to all.
The voice improvements, particularly the assistant's ability to initiate a conversation proactively, open up exciting new possibilities for interacting with your smart home.
As always, before proceeding with the update, be sure to back up your system. And if you tend to be cautious (like me!), you might want to test this new version on a staging Home Assistant installation before applying it to your main system.
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