2023.5: Let's talk!

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Home Assistant Core 2023.5! 🎉

What an exciting release we have for you this month! This release is all about voice (well, almost fully), and I’m super excited we can ship you all this truly amazing stuff!

I’ve been following the progress of this all being built this month, and really, I’ve been mindblown multiple times a week. So what is in here? Well, you can now actually talk to Home Assistant! 🤯

I really appreciate that all these voice elements have been built the Home Assistant way: to be fully configurable and extendable. Giving you choices, including entirely local options for your own voice assistant.

This release is packed! And we are not even halfway through Home Assistant’s Year of the voice yet…

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 3 May 2023, at 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CEST!

Let’s talk!

Our goal for 2023 is to let you control Home Assistant in your own language: It is Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice! After chapter 1 in January, we announced chapter 2 in this exciting journey last week!

This release ships everything (plus more) that was announced! This means, as of this release, you can actually start talking to Home Assistant! 🎙️

Here is a quick summary of all that has been announced, linked to the place you can read more about each of them:

To help you get started, we made sure the documentation is perfect, including some cool project tutorials to jump-start your own private voice assistant journey:

If you missed last week’s live stream, be sure to check it out. It is full of live demos and detailed explanations of everything packed into this release. The recording of the live stream:

Manage what is exposed to your voice assistants

A brand new and exciting menu item can be found in your Settings menu: Voice assistants!

Screenshot showing the brand new menu item in the settings menu: Voice assistants.

This new settings item gives you access to many fantastic new voice features; it also provides a new Expose tab where you can manage which entities are exposed to your Assist, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Screenshot showing the new expose entities tab in the voice assistants menu.

It gives an overview of what entities you have exposed to your voice assistants and easily remove or add new ones. Clicking on an entity in this screen will bring up the voice assistant setting for that entity, allowing you to turn on/off the entity’s exposure to a specific voice assistant and manage the entity’s aliases.

Screenshot showing the new expose entities tab in the voice assistants menu.

This currently supports our Assist, and Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant via Home Assistant Cloud.

Improved entity setting

Some nice tweaks have been made to the entity settings dialog, making it easier to use and look cleaner.

The entity settings dialog used to have an expandable advanced section, which you could expand to access features like showing/hiding/disabling entities, changing the area, etc.

The advanced section has been removed, and all its features have been reorganized. So, no features were lost while providing a much nicer interface.

Screenshot showing the new and improved entity settings dialog.

And, since this is the year of the voice, you may notice the “Voice assistants” option in the above screenshot, which will bring up:

Screenshot showing the new voice assistant expose controls accessible directly from the entity settings dialog.

This allows you to quickly change the voice assistants the entity is exposed to, including its aliases, without having to navigate back to the voice assistants panel in the main settings screen.

Configuring the LEDs of your Home Assistant Yellow

The enclosure of our amazing Home Assistant Yellow allows you to look at the beautiful board and parts inside of it.

However, the LEDs on the board might light up your environment when it is dark in an unwanted way. For example, when you sleep in the same room as your Home Assistant Yellow is in.

As of this release, you can configure (turn on/off) the disk, heartbeat, and power LEDs of your Home Assistant Yellow by using the Configure button on the Settings > Hardware page.

Screenshot that show the new LED settings for the Home Assistant Yellow.

Webhooks trigger options

Webhooks have been extended this release. We now have support for webhooks that use the GET HTTP method!

But that is not all. Thanks to @esev, we also got some new security features for our webhook triggers. You can now set which HTTP methods your webhook trigger work with and the ability to limit webhooks to only work on your local network.

Screenshot showing the new options available on a Webhook automation trigger.

New Assist pipeline and language selectors

If you are building automation or scripts Blueprints, you can now leverage two new UI selectors for use with your Blueprints: an Assist pipeline selector and a language selector.

Screenshot showing the language selector. The language selector let's a user choose from a list of languages.

You could, for example, leverage this in a notification Blueprint to allow setting a different language on a text-to-speech notification.

More information can be found in our selectors documentation.

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • Home Assistant Operating System v10 has been released! The ODROID M-1 is now supported, improved data disk support and memory management. Bug fixes and reliability improvements for Bluetooth and Thread.
  • Matter now has support for covers, thanks @hidaris!
  • The process of making backups is now faster 🚀, thanks @bdraco!
  • @bdraco also gave the ONVIF integration some love, which should improve the stability of the integration. Nice!
  • You can now set up multiple instances of the OpenAI Conversation integration with, for example, different prompts. Thanks, @balloob!
  • @rubenbe added direction support to MQTT fans! Nice!
  • BTHome added support for button and dimmer events. This means it supports the brand new Shelly BLU Button1! Thanks, @Ernst79!
  • The Supervisor can now create repair issues for some of the issues it detected on your system. Awesome @mdegat01!
  • @mib1185 added a service to allow sorting of the Shopping list. Thanks!
  • @depoll added an attribute to the Person entities that list the device trackers for this person. Very useful for templates! Thanks!
  • The NextDNS integration added a whole bunch of new parental control switches, thanks @bieniu!
  • Synology DSM can now browse your Synology Photos in the media browser. Cool addition, @lodesmets!
  • Simplepush now supports attachments, thanks to @tymm!
  • Some Z-Wave notification sensors won’t clear to idle automatically. Now you can use the new notification idle buttons to idle them manually!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. This one is new:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2023.5.1 - May 4

Release 2023.5.2 - May 5

Release 2023.5.3 - May 14

Release 2023.5.4 - May 23

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

Farewell to the following

The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2023.5