Paulus joins us to break down 2025.5 and the State of the Open Home

Headlines

• Open Home Foundation Updates with Paulus
  
• 2million homes now using Home Assistant
  
• Home Assistant Community Survey
  Annika from Nabu Casa presented some stats around Home Assistant users
  
  67% of homes have 11-100 devices
  75% own their home
  65% of homes have two or more floors
  On average have 2.84 inhabitants
  78% live with their partner, 43% have children, 50% have pets
  46% of partners and 27% of children interact with Home Assistant directly
  
• New Works with Home Assistant partners
• Community Day
  Check out the community day page on the Home Assistant website to find a community day meetup happening near you on Saturday May 24th.
  
• Jake has emailed in asking for parental ideas
  
  

New Features

• Backups
  When updating a new toggle is available to select an automatic backup before an update happens. It is now possible to choose if automatic backups are default toggled on or off.
  
  S3 Support added, with setting for how long the retention should be.
  
  Restarting Home Assistant while a backup is in progress will wait until the backup is complete.
  
• New text-to-speech voice variants
  Angry, whispering, voice, with some new voices for selected languages
  
• Entity Picking
  Has added more context to the entity picker, including the area and device.
  
  The entity ID is now not shown, but there is a setting in the user preferences where you can display the entity ID in the picker.
  
• When adding a template to an action in the editor – now works out which field has a template and only shows a code block for the attribute that is a template.
  
• You can now directly paste YAML to the Automation Editor, making it easier to bring in shared automations from others
  
• Network Discovery
  Some cool Network tools have been added
  
• Z-wave Smart Start and Long Range
  You can scan smart-start QR codes over HTTP now, and
  
  Long range support is also added
  
• Badges can now be wrapped or scrolled
  
• HomeKit: Air Purifiers are now supported
  
• OpenAI Conversation
  Now supports the ability to generate PDF’s
  
• Add an LLM support for fetching todo list items
  Allows LLM’s to query todo list items for you to be able to ask “Read my grocery list” etc
  

New Integrations

• Imeon Inverter
  Integrates your Imeon inverter, allowing you to monitor your home battery and solar usage in the energy dashboard.
  
• Miele
  Monitor and control your Miele home appliances, including washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers, and more!
  
• ntfy
  Integrates with ntfy.sh, a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service that allows you to send notifications to your phones or desktops.
  
• S3
  Use an Amazon S3 storage bucket–or any S3 API compatible storage provider– as a backup location for your Home Assistant backups.
  

Breaking Changes

• Theming
  Polymer Components Removed: CSS helpers names with paper*
  
• Persistent Notifications
  Persistent notifications are no longer added when devices are discovered.
  

Links

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/04/24/community-day/