On October 11, 2023, we were informed that an open-source contributor received a cease and desist letter from Mazda North American Operations (Mazda) regarding his library to connect with Mazda services. This library was used by the Home Assistant integration Mazda Connected Services, which he also maintained. A DMCA notice was sent to GitHub requesting the removal of all code and forked repositories as well.

The contributor has complied with the cease and desist letter. The library is no longer available, and the Mazda Connected Services integration has been removed from Home Assistant in the 2023.10.2 patch release of Home Assistant released on October 12, 2023.

Home Assistant is disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position. We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.

We invite Mazda to speak with us about this topic. We would love to have an open and constructive discussion about the potential that a Home Assistant integration has for them and their customers. We genuinely believe there is a common ground between us and Mazda when it comes to enabling the owners of their cars to explore the possibilities of their own data.

After all, other car manufacturers do see this potential. For example, Tesla has recently released official API documentation to support third-party apps. Volkswagen Group’s Audi brand has launched an app store in their cars that features the Home Assistant app. We hope Mazda will see this potential, as well.

This year is Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice. It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant by speaking in their own language.

We’ve got great news: wake words are finally here! After 4 chapters, we now have the final building block for voice in Home Assistant.

In Chapter 1, we started with text commands such as “turn on the kitchen light” and “open garage door”. We now support 56 languages and have 188 contributors helping to translate common smart home commands for everyone.

Chapter 2 introduced audio for voice commands: both speech-to-text and text-to-speech. This included local options for maximum privacy as well as support for Home Assistant Cloud for incredible speed and language coverage. Lastly in Chapter 3, we added the ability to set Home Assistant as your default assistant on Android phones and watches.

For Chapter 4, we’ve now added wake word processing inside Home Assistant. Wake words are special words or phrases that tell a voice assistant that a command is about to be spoken. Examples are: Hey Google, Hey Siri or Alexa.

Home Assistant’s wake words are leveraging a new project called openWakeWord by David Scripka. This project has real-world accuracy, runs on commodity hardware and anyone can train a basic model of their own wake word in an hour, for free.

To try wake words today, follow our updated guide to the $13 voice assistant.

To watch the video presentation of this blog post, including live demos, check the recording of our live stream.

Home Assistant Core 2023.10! 🎉

October! 🎃 It means we’ve just celebrated our birthday; we are now 10 years old! 🎂 In case you’ve missed our birthday YouTube stream with all the cool announcements, we’ve summed it all up in our 10 year Home Assistant blog post.

Even more exciting news, as this is Home Assistant’s year of the voice: Chapter 4 of this endeavor has been announced and will be streamed live on YouTube on 12 October 2023, at 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CEST! Be sure to tune in! I’ve seen some early demos… All I’m going to say is: It is mind-blowing! 🤯

As for this release, because of all of the above, it is a bit smaller than usual in terms of features. I promise that chapter 4 is going to make it all worth it. Yet, it contains tons of updates, bug fixes, and a couple of beautiful new features for the tile card! 🤩

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Update Oct 2: In a conversation with The Verge, Philips Hue has announced that they will update their privacy policy to require users to consent to share their usage data with Philips Hue.

Original Post

Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.

Last week I wrote how toying with the first Philips Hue hub and their local API led me to start Home Assistant back in 2013. They have played an important role in my smart home and they were a role model for our Open Home vision. Sure, they are expensive but they work reliably, have a local API, can be used completely offline, and you don’t have to share your data with the cloud.

But things are changing, for the worse. When you open the Philips Hue app you will now be prompted with a new message: Starting soon, you’ll need to be signed in.

Left: A new tip informs users that they soon need to login.
Right: the screen shown when clicking learn more

TL; DR:

• Home Assistant is 10 years old and the second most active open source project on GitHub.
• Nabu Casa is 5 years old. There are no investors and development of Home Assistant is sustainable.
• Home Assistant Cloud now supports custom domains for remote connections.
• The Open Home vision is updated and is now about privacy, choice and sustainability.
• The Home Assistant logo has been streamlined and refined, yet remains familiar. Learn more here.
• Home Assistant Green is a new $99 hub and the easiest way to get started for people new to the Home Assistant ecosystem. Learn more here.

Back in 2021, we launched a crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Yellow. Home Assistant Yellow was our take on what a smart home hub should look like, with all the features we enthusiasts want. We’re very proud of Home Assistant Yellow, but at the same time, it has become clear that people just starting their smart home journey don’t need all the features Yellow offers. With the global component shortages making the required Compute Module 4 more expensive and harder to find, Home Assistant Yellow is no longer a good fit for beginners.

We’ve taken that to heart, and today, we are introducing an affordable way for new users to upgrade their smart homes to Home Assistant. It’s the Home Assistant Green – and it costs only $99 (MSRP).

Hello all, this is Madelena. You may know me from some of my previous projects. 🙂

As you may have heard from our celebration for the 10th anniversary of Home Assistant, we are making some tweaks to our logo! This is no small feat, as the logo is a big part of the identity of Home Assistant, and by extension a representation of the contributions of our community. This logo has served us well for 8 years. When we see the logo, it represents the culmination of work that we are all proud of.

For those who want to use our logo and for more details, the latest brand guidelines and logo assets can be found at our design repository.

Join us on September 17 to look back on ten years of Home Assistant and hear some very special announcements…

Home Assistant Core 2023.9! 🎉

Frenck is enjoying a well earned holiday, so I’m taking care of the release this month.

This month, on the 17th, it has been 10 years since Home Assistant started. We’ll be preparing a special event on the Home Assistant YouTube channel to celebrate, reflect and look ahead. We will have some cool announcements too! We hope you can join us on the 17th @ 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CET!

This release is pretty packed! With some very nice updates to the UI with new entity dialogs for climate entities, and lots of tile card features. Template sensors can be created from the UI now, and for the more advanced template sensors, the ability to get data from services! A new service to get the weather forecast, and better options to display different forecasts.

And something you will probably not see when you are already using Home Assistant: the onboarding flow is completely redesigned!

I absolutely love it!

Enjoy the release!

Bram

Home Assistant Core 2023.8! 🎉

Another month, another fine release of Home Assistant! This release is a bit more conservative after two absolutely packed releases in June and July. Many of us are enjoying summer holidays 🏖️.

Pretty much all features in this release are absolutely amazing, and it is hard to pick a favorite. Great translation improvements that help with the user experience, a new entity to capture events from things like remotes, and the new Assist features are, again, mind-blowing!

Talking about Assist, have you seen the blog on Year of the Voice - Chapter 3? Or, check the live stream recording on YouTube, where the new features have been demonstrated.

Some new integrations have been added too. Most notably Opower! This integration can pull in energy usage data from many utility companies in the United States. For example, it supports PG&E, ComEd, BGE, and many more! ⚡️ Very good news for all our American friends!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck