Rohan and Phil are joined by Frenck to discuss the Sonos takeover of Snips, and the final release of 2019
The Cloud Strikes Back
Snips is a popular self-hosted voice control system that has been compatible with Home Assistant for quite some time. On November 20, SONOS announced that it had acquired the software, which it would use to create a privacy focussed local voice assistant for SONOS speakers. Within a week, SONOS announced that the Snips Console will be closing to the public. This console allows users to create and manage their own voice control for their homes. With this change, the Snips system becomes useless to tinkerers and other self-hosted enthusiasts who wanted local voice control.0.103
New Features
- Automation Editor now supports YAML In a previous release, we saw the developer tools moving away from JSON to support YAML. You can now edit your automations in the UI using YAML as well!
- You can now create scenes by taking a snapshot of entities The scene.create service has been updated to allow you to create scenes based on the current state of devices. Using the new snapshot_entities parameter, you can add the entities you wish to capture their current state of to be added to the new scene. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/11255
- Proxmox VE Integration Proxmox is a local virtualization system, allowing you to run systems in virtual machines similar to VirtualBox. With this integration in Home Assistant, you’ll now be able to see binary sensors for your containers and virtual machines. Allowing Home Assistant to know which containers/VMS are running or not. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/10660
- Flume Integration Flume is a smart water meter that can track how much water your house is consuming, which may help identify if there is a leak somewhere. Home Assistant will now be able to report in real-time how much water your house is using. Great for people who want to graph that with Grafana https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27235
- Starline Integration (Russia) If your car has an active Starline account, you can now get information in Home Assistant about your car. Some of the data you’ll be able to see includes the state of your door locks, if the handbrake is on, and the temperature of your car. There’s also device tracking support, so you can see where your car is. As well as support to remote start or stop the engine. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/27197
Breaking Changes
- This is the final release to support Python 3.6
- Many changes to service names, as part of a massive overhaul We’ve seen many of these coming through in previous releases. In this release many platforms are affected, so be sure to check the release notes before you hit that update button.
- Emulated Hue will need to be reset Unfortunately, there’s a change to the backend in this release to ensure the emulated hue component is compatible with the Hue protocol moving forward. If you’re using emulated Hue, you’ll need to clear out all of your entities and then re-discover devices on your Google Home or Amazon Echo. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/28317
- MiFlora will now report states as unavailable If your MiFlora device hasn’t reported in for some time, the values will now be set as unavailable so you know when to change the batteries. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/29276
Other Noteworthy Updates
- Amazon Echo can now be told to open and close covers/blinds If you have blinds exposed to the Echo, you can now use phrases like “set the office blinds to open” to open the blinds. Unfortunately, the set word seems to be required in the phrase.
- Lutron now has support for fans
