Skip to main content

Home Assistant 2025.4

This release introduces the new experimental Areas dashboard with automatic area-based organization, a new Clock card, improved Voice wizard with better configuration guidance, continuing conversations with LLM, conversation initiation from Home Assistant, and Cloud backup restore during onboarding.

Main Features​

New Experimental Areas Dashboard​

Until now, the default dashboard served as a simple starting point - a list of entities grouped by area or domain. While useful for beginners, it quickly became limited as smart homes grew.

The new experimental Areas dashboard automatically generates a ready-to-use dashboard based on the areas you've set up in your home. It uses sections and tile cards for a modern, clean, and intuitive look - instantly. No more starting from a blank page!

Each area now has its own dedicated page, providing you with a clear and organized view of the devices in that space. Entities, such as lights, blinds, cameras, and more, are automatically grouped by domain, so you can easily find the ones you need.

Want to customize it? Yes, you can! You can rearrange, show, or hide entities according to your preferences. At the top of each area page, temperature and humidity badges quickly show the comfort level in the room, which are configurable in the area settings.

On top of all that, the overview page ties everything together, displaying all your areas in one place. Each section corresponds to a room in your home.

New Card - Clock Card​

After a while, a new card was added! Thanks to @mrdarrengriffin, Home Assistant now has a Clock card!

Yes, the card "just" displays the current time, but it's a really nice addition to the card collection. It can be a great card for dashboards displayed on things like a wall tablet!

The Clock card offers several customization options, including the ability to adjust the clock size, time zone, show seconds next to hours and minutes, and choose between 12-hour or 24-hour format.

Improved Voice Wizard​

If you're setting up a device compatible with Home Assistant's voice assistant, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, you'll be guided through the process of setting up the voice assistant, and this experience was significantly improved in this release.

Because the voice experience offers more choices, including local options like Speech-to-Phrase, it's important to make the right choices for your use case.

The wizard now helps you make more informed decisions based on your language, desired functionality, and device capabilities, ensuring you get the best experience with your voice assistant.

Continuing Conversations with LLM​

Have you ever tried having a conversation with your voice assistant that's connected to an LLM like ChatGPT? It's good fun. However, having to say "Ok Nabu" every time you respond to one of Assist's questions can really slow things down.

This release introduces the ability to have a continuing conversation with an LLM. If the LLM returns a question, it's detected and the conversation keeps running without having to say "Ok Nabu" again.

Initiating Conversations​

During Voice chapter 9 the ability for Home Assistant to call analog phones to initiate a conversation was added. As of this release, this feature is now available for ESPHome-based voice assistants, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition!

This is a fantastic feature because it allows you to create custom automations that can send voice prompts from your voice assistant and listen for a response, instead of having to start the conversation by saying the wake word.

For example, imagine you left the garage door open, and a few minutes later your assistant says: "Hey, I noticed you left the garage door open, do you want me to close it for you?" You simply answer "yes" or "no" and it handles the rest... 🤯

This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for voice-driven automations.

Onboarding with Home Assistant Cloud Backup​

If you're a Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa user, that means you can securely store a backup of your Home Assistant installation in the cloud as part of your subscription.

As of this release, you can directly restore your backup from Home Assistant Cloud during the onboarding process of your new Home Assistant installation.

This means you can be up and running with your new Home Assistant installation in no time, with all your settings, automations, and integrations restored from your backup.

New Integrations​

The following new integrations are added in this release:

  • Bosch Alarm - Control and monitor your Bosch security systems/control panels
  • Remote calendar - Add remote URL calendars as calendars to Home Assistant
  • Pterodactyl - Control and monitor your Pterodactyl game server management panel

Significant Improvements to Existing Integrations​

It's not just new integrations that have been added; existing integrations are also constantly being improved. Here are some significant changes to existing integrations:

Other Notable Changes​

  • Home Assistant Yellow Zigbee/Thread chip and Home Assistant ZBT-1 can now be updated directly through Home Assistant update entities. Great @puddly!
  • When viewing entity details in the entity dialog, more context about where the entity comes from is now provided. Such as its device and the area it's in. @piitaya!
  • Sensors about backups are now available! Providing information about things like when the last backup ran. Thanks @mib1185!
  • Variables in automations & scripts were significantly simplified and fixed by @arturpragacz. All variables are now accessible anywhere in the script or automation!

New Template Functions​

For power users who use templates in automations, scripts, or maybe even on dashboards, this release has several additions to the templating engine that might be useful:

  • combine – Combine multiple dictionaries
  • difference – Find elements present in one list but not in another
  • flatten – Flatten a list of lists into a single list
  • floor_entities – Get entities associated with a specific floor
  • intersect – Identify common elements between lists
  • md5, sha1, sha256, sha512 – Perform common hashing operations
  • shuffle – Randomly shuffle items in a list
  • typeof – Determine the type of a variable or object for debugging
  • union – Merge unique elements from two lists

Device Hierarchy for Energy Management​

This release brings an improvement to Home Assistant's energy management system - something that was highly requested by the community.

This means you can now create a device hierarchy in your energy configuration, creating parent-child relationships between devices.

For example, imagine you have a circuit breaker monitoring the total energy consumption of a circuit, but also separately tracking individual devices connected to that circuit. Previously, Home Assistant could count this consumption twice. Now it understands these relationships and accurately displays the consumption of individual devices without duplication.

Video z Release Party​

More Information​

Last updated on

Comments