2025.4 – A new areas dashboard and some big announcements (for us!)

Headlines

• State of the Open Home
  The state of the open home date is set for April 12, 11:00 am Pacific, 02:00 pm Eastern, and will be live-streamed on the Open Home Foundation YouTube channel.
  
• Home Assistant is now matter certified
  
• Open Home Foundation gets 10th place in Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” for 2025
  
• MotionBlinds joins Works with Home Assistant
  
• Global Home Assistant Community Day
  Saturday May 24th. Watch out for an event close to you!
  
• Podcast Updates
  We’ve got some exciting updates for the podcast starting this month!
  
  Thanks to our Sponsors, and our Patreon members like Rob and Benny – we’re increasing the number of episodes in your feed. We’re launching two “mini-series” of creators – talking to some other creators in the smart home space about their journeys with Home Automation.
  
  We’ll also be talking with some vendors starting with the another Works With Home Assistant member, Apollo Automation.
  
  These episodes of course are in addition to our regular release episodes and guest interviews with other listeners and community members like yourself- which if you want to come and share your story with us you should email [email protected]
  
  We wouldn’t be able to do this if it wasn’t for the support of you listening to the podcast, our Patreon members and our sponsors like Nabu Casa.
  
  Speaking of we’re excited to have Zooz now helping us make these episodes possible
  
• Switchbot Home Assistant Integration Updates
  Switchbot Hub 3 will be added to Home Assistant, which should unlock 45 devices being compatible with Home Assistant
  

New Features

• Voice PE Continued Conversation
  If the LLM asks a question back you can just keep talking
  
• Customise the bell for notifications
  
• LLMs don’t send the whole house state
  Not necessary, makes things faster especially for local LLMs
  
• OpenAI
  Now has we search option available, so you can ask what the weather is
  
• New UI to help setup voice assistants
  Gives you more context when choosing the system to process your voice.
  
• New Areas Dashboard
  Instantly populates a dashboard based on Areas. For each area the devices are listed, with lights on top, temperature sensors in the headers.
  
  You can choose to hide areas and devices from this dashboard, so if you have test/dummy/empty areas they are hidden
  
• New Backup Sensors
  Last successful backup
  Next successful backup
  Are we currently backing up
  
• UI Breadcrumbs
  In the more info panel there’s now a breadcrumb link to the device, above the entity name. May include the area and device where available.
  
• Clock card!
  No longer need to do template to put the time on the dashboard. No dates, no colours, just a clock for now.
  
• Restoring backups during onboarding
  If you are a Nabu Casa subscriber, when setting up a new Home Assistant instance, you can now restore from Nabu Casa Cloud.
  
  Bringing the iPhone restore experience to Home Assistant.
  
• SmartThings
  Many updates
  
  Can now update firmware of devices connected to SmartThings
  
• Home Connect
  Gets some love. Bosch and Siemens use this integration
  
• Roborock
  Now supports dryer controls
  
• Reolink
  Smart AI sensors now supported, along with a day/night sensors
  
• Habiticia
  There’s a whole bunch of new actions to help you manage your habits, rewards and dailies.
  
• OneDrive
  There’s now a new action allowing you to upload files directly to OneDrive.
  
• Home Assistant Yellow and ZBT-1 (formerly SkyConnect) can now be updated from Home Assistant
  
• Blueprints
  If you create blueprints, the device select can now filter by model ID
  
• HomeKit
  TVs can now be turned on/off
  
• Google Assistant
  Lawn mowers now supported
  
• Card Actions
  Hold and double tap can now be set from the UI
  
• Templates
  Lights and switches now support the new YAML syntax.
  
  New functions/filters have also been added to make your life easier, including a new shuffle option!
  
• Energy Management
  Device Hierarchy for energy management allows you to show a breakdown where you may have two energy sensors contributing to usage.
  

New Integrations

• Pterdecactyl
  Monitor your game servers
  
• Remote Calendar
  You can now import remote iCal URLs into Home Assistant
  

Breaking Changes

• Automation and Script Variable Scopes
  The variables action is no longer restricted to local scopes, it can now update the value of a variable also in outer scopes. If the variable was not previously defined, it will be created in the top-level (script run) scope.
  
• Hue
  The effect None for hue lights has been changed to off.
  
• Persistent Notifications
  Persistent notifications with notification_id config_entry_reconfigure are no longer created when an integration fail to authenticate. Automations triggering on such persistent notification will thus no longer work.
  
• Reolink
  The Reolink password is now limited to 31 characters. The latest versions of the Reolink app and desktop client also have this 31 password character limit. If you configured your Reolink password years ago, it is possible it is longer than 31 characters. In that case you will get a reauthentication flow asking you to change the password. Passwords longer than 31 characters can cause issues in the latests Reolink API.
  

Links Discussed

• https://www.fastcompany.com/91269253/consumer-electronics-most-innovative-companies-2025