2024.12 – Frenck breaks down the final release for 2024 with us

Headlines

• Improved Scene Editor Experience
  When editing a scene in the Home Assistant UI, the scene is applied as soon as you open the scene editor!
  
  Now the scene editor has two modes, review and edit mode
  
• LLM fallback for voice
  You can now set-up a voice assistant in a way that will target built-in intents first, and only fallback to a LLM-based agent if no matches were found.
  
• Faster Voice
  HASSIL, the Home Assistant intent parser has had some fantastic speed improvements.
  
• Tease for the upcoming voice hardware…
• Language leaders are ON FIRE!
  
• Revised Integration Quality Scale
  The new Integration Quality Scale is no longer just focussed on code, but the overall user-experience the integration brings. It is now a more holistic view on the integration.
  
• Python 3.13
  Python 3.13 offers a speed boost to Home Assistant overall.
  
  Running Home Assistant OS or using the Home Assistant Container? No sweat—we’ve got you covered. The upgrade to Python 3.13 is handled automatically. Just update Home Assistant as usual, and you’re good to go.

New Features

• Reolink
  PTZ Tilt Sensor position sensor. There is also bitrate and framerate select entities.
  
• Habiticia
  Binary sensors now available.
  
  Actions now supported for scoring habits and rewards
  
  Calendars have been added for to-do and daily reminders
  
• Unifi Protect
  New fingerprint and NFC events
  
• Time Entities
  Support time entities in automation time conditions/triggers selectors
  
• Download Camera Snapshots
  Add download snapshot button to camera more info dialog
  
• Automation Editor
  Show YAML parsing errors in automation editor
  
• Units of Measurement
  There is an edge case for translations for units of measurement.
  
  Although for most cases, units do not need translation (like °C or kWh), there are many sensors in ones home that might use units that are specific and not standarized. For example, a sensor that measures the amount of “people” in a home, or one that tells you how many “movies” are in your collection.
  
  So, if you now have a sensor that has a custom unit of measurement, like the amount of “movies” in your collection, integrations can now provide translations for those units.

New Integrations

• Acacia
  Acacia coffee scales now supported in Home Assistant. Local push integration.
  
• Music Assistant
  The integration is now official ♥️
  
• Nord Pool
  Pulls in latest energy prices from the Nord Pool energy market as sensors. “Nord Pool runs the leading power market in Europe”
  
  Cloud polling integration
  
• Sky Remote
  The Sky Remote integration lets you control a Sky box using Home Assistant. Intended to control all Sky satellite receiver boxes with a LAN port. It will not control Sky stream pucks.
  
  ”Assumed state” integration

Breaking Changes

• Ecovacs
  Ecovacs devices not recognized by the library will no longer use the fallback vacuum. Instead, the device will not be added to Home Assistant, and a warning log will created.
  
• Glances
  The Glances v2 API has been deprecated and removed. To continue using the integration, upgrade to v3 or higher.
  
• Templates
  The this template variable which is available in some templatable helpers was previously based on the new state instead of the current state.
  
  The change affects the following integrations, if templates the use the this variable. The user might have to update their templates to reflect the above change using the value variable instead, which holds the new value.
• Z-wave
  With this release, you will need to update your zwave-js-server instance. You must use zwave-js-server 1.39.0 or greater (schema 39).