Home Assistant

0.50: Voice control, History improvements, and Xiaomi

Paulus Schoutsen 13 minutes reading time
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Last Wednesday we released Hass.io, an operating system to take care of all the updating hassles that come with running home automation at home and so much more. This is a major milestone for Home Assistant as it is our first step to offering a fully integrated solution using a bring your own hardware approach.

The launch has been crazy successful. The 20 minute introduction video by BRUHAutomation already has 12.5k views in just 4 days with no less than 150 comments.

Hass.io will be a great foundation for bigger and better integrated features. Stay tuned.

Adding the power of voice to integrations

But enough about Hass.io, let’s not forget about Home Assistant. This release has completely revamped the way how we deal with voice integrations. We turned Home Assistant into a platform to write voice apps, no matter where the processing of the voice happens. This can be done by Alexa, Google Assistant or in the Home Assistant user interface.

We are super excited about the new functionality and hope that it will trigger a new type of applications and systems to be built on top of Home Assistant. This release includes a shopping list to show the new functionality. As a user you can add any item to the shopping list with your voice and also ask what is on your shopping list.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
shopping_list:

To make testing these applications easier, we’ve updated the conversation component. The component will now allow sentences to be configured that hook directly into the new voice functionality. Combined with the new interface it will allow for some great interactions! Check out the developer docs for more information.

History improvements

@OverloadUT has been recently spending a lot of time on optimizing the history database queries. This release includes PR #8632, the first in a list of improvements that he is working on. This PR greatly improves requests for single entities by using an optimized query for this use case.

The performance change in some of his tests shows this change to be about 300x faster (30 seconds to 0.1 seconds!) (There is no theoretical upper limit due to the issue with multi-entity queries getting worse the longer the current recorder run has been going.)

Xiaomi integration

Yes, it has happened! After being in beta for a while, the Xiaomi support is now available to all. @danielhiversen did an amazing job and we now support sensors, switches, lights and covers.

Velbus integration

Another awesome integration is that of the Velbus home automation system which has been contributed by @thomasdelaet. It integrates their sensors, covers, fans, lights and switches.

Manual alarm with MQTT control

A new version of the manual alarm component is now available with full MQTT control thanks to @colinodell. Using this you can build your own control panel to remotely arm/disarm the alarm. For example, using a Raspberry Pi to create an alarm.

New Platforms

Release 0.50.2 - July 31

Straight to 0.50.2. We released 0.50 as 0.50.1 due to an upload error to PyPi.

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Breaking Changes

alexa:
snips:
apiai:

intent_script:
  LightKitchen:
    speech:
      type: plain
      text: I did the work, yay.
    card:
      type: simple
      title: Lights Card
      content: I have turned on the lights.
    action:
      service: light.turn_on
      data:
        entity_id: light.kitchen

conversation:
  intents:
    LightKitchen:
      - The kitchen is magic
  • Switch fritzdect: attributes have been renamed to use underscores and no capital letters (@thomasklingbeil - #8436) (switch.fritzdect docs) (breaking change)
  • Yahoo Weather: no longer allow configuring forecasts but include all instead. (@fanthos - #8626) (weather.yweather docs) (breaking change)
  • The Home Assistant Z-Wave Cover implementation has been updated to support the latest development version of OpenZWave. If you are currently applying a workaround to your OpenZWave installation to support the barrier command class, you’ll need to make sure you update your workaround to the latest development version of OpenZWave. (@firstof9 - #8574) (cover docs) (cover.zwave docs) (breaking change)

All changes