Home Assistant is one of the most private home automation systems that exist right now, since everything is done locally in our home, without depending on any manufacturer’s cloud, which can stop working at any time. We are halfway through the year 2024, the development team has announced the news that is to come in the remainder of this year. The main novelty is that they want to “open” themselves to the general public, facilitating both installation and configuration as well as improving the entire main menu so that it is easy to launch by anyone, and not only for the most experts.
This project is more alive than ever, many users, in order not to depend on companies like Amazon with Alexa, Google with its Google Home, or Apple with its HomeKIT and Siri, decide to use Home Assistant to have total control of all home automation. A long time ago, this project was only valid for advanced users, however, little by little they are greatly facilitating its use to open it to all audiences. The goal of this project is to become the best platform for the smart home, with maximum privacy, configurability, and ease of implementation. According to the comments of many users, what is most difficult for them is to facilitate the actions so that the rest of the members of the household can use it comfortably and intuitively. The development team has been working for months to improve precisely this point.
More intuitive control panels
The development team is remaking the control panels from scratch, making them much easier to configure and more intuitive to use. With the new “Sections” layout this has been greatly improved, the same goes for the new tile cards and even drag and drop. The goal is to implement an intuitive grid system so that the user can easily configure it.
A future goal is to have a default panel that offers the user two options: list all entities, or start from scratch and perform manual configuration. This will allow you not to always have to start from scratch, but rather to have a base and from there, get different controls. The access privacy of different administrator users, house members and even guests will also be improved in the future.
Private voice assistants
Currently, if we want a voice assistant, we have to resort to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, both options do not respect privacy like Home Assistant does. The current priority of the development team is to continue improving Assist, to integrate timers, reminders and even controls for music played on speakers. Right now to start Assist it is necessary to install and configure several things, the team wants to greatly facilitate this and will soon develop hardware as a voice assistant like the Amazon Echo, which will be configured almost transparently with the home automation, and we can interact with it.
The day smart speakers that connect with Home Assistant begin to appear, we will be able to take home automation to a new level, since we will not even have to open the application to perform different actions, simply telling the speaker will be enough.
Improved automations
Home Assistant’s automations are very complete, since we can do almost anything thanks to how they are designed. However, the weak point is that it is often difficult to carry out automations, so it is something that you should take into account. During this year, the automations have been improved, allowing us to organize them by tags and categories, and later filter them so that they only show us the ones we want.
The goal for the remainder of the year is to make them much easier to create from scratch. Automations that can be very simple, the truth is that they are complex if we start to configure them, and that is what the team wants to improve. Right now automations are only carried out by “advanced” users or the system administrator, the goal is that the rest of the members of the house can easily configure these automations.
Home Assistant Cloud
If we hire the Nabu Casa subscription service right now, we can remotely access our Home Assistant very easily, without having to set up a VPN server, configure a reverse proxy, or use a service like Cloudflare Tunnel. Furthermore, another very interesting aspect is that we can integrate both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant almost transparently, not as if we wanted to integrate it manually, which is much more complicated.
The news that is to come are the following:
- Incorporation of two-factor authentication (2FA) to improve authentication security.
- Backup of our home automation system in the cloud, with encryption both in transit and at origin, to maintain our privacy. This would allow our home automation system to be restored in a matter of minutes if there is a disaster.
- Monitoring from the cloud. The service will detect if there is a problem with the Home Assistant instance, and will alert us by email that there is a problem.
As you can see, they plan to integrate interesting new features in the Home Assistant Cloud version. In addition, if you subscribe you will be helping the project financially.
Finally, they also plan to greatly improve compatibility and certification with standards such as ZigBee, Z-Wave and even Matter, so that users who use these technologies do not have any problems using it.
