"Turn on every light downstairs except the kitchen" has so far meant giving up on the floor as a target and listing each light by hand. Home Assistant now has a way around that. A set of changes merged on 22 October 2026 adds exclusions to the targets of actions, triggers and conditions. The code is in the development branch, so it should ship with
The Open Home Foundation, the non-profit behind Home Assistant and ESPHome, has published a position paper called "Choice in the smart home". It went up on the foundation's website on 22 October 2026 and spells out what the foundation wants manufacturers to build and what it wants legislators to make law. These are recommendations. Nothing in the p
Anyone who put down a deposit for UGREEN's HomeAgent hub will wait a lot longer than planned. On 22 October 2026 matter-smarthome reported, citing an official statement from UGREEN, that the Kickstarter campaign for the HomeAgent systems moves from November 2026 to 13 April 2027. The first products should ship no earlier than the end of June 2027.
Assist, the voice assistant built into Home Assistant, can run without any cloud service. A voice command then goes through four stages on your own hardware: wake word detection, speech-to-text, the conversation agent that works out what you meant, and text-to-speech for the reply. Home Assistant calls this chain a pipeline, and each stage can use
Three fixes merged into Home Assistant Core on 21 October 2026 deal with the hour that happens twice when daylight saving time ends. They touch the schedule helper, time_pattern triggers and long-term statistics. All three came from Raman Gupta, were reviewed by Paulus Schoutsen, and were found with property-based testing.
Many Home Assistant blueprints ask for settings that only matter in one mode. Four pull requests by Paul Bottein, merged on 21 and 22 October 2026, add a visible condition that shows an input, or a whole section of inputs, only when another field has a given value. It works in blueprints and in the setup and options forms of integrations. The chang
The Group integration in Home Assistant gets a new member type: calendars. Joakim Plate's change, merged on 21 October 2026, lets you combine several calendar entities, for example work, school and family, into a single calendar entity. It is in the development branch, so it should ship with Home Assistant 2026.11.
Tuesday Labs, a robotics lab and design studio from New York City, opened reservations on 20 October 2026 for Voxel Series-1, a two-legged robot meant to tidy up and fetch things around the home. The Verge reported the news the same day. A reservation costs $200 and is fully refundable. The company estimates the final price at about $20,000 and say
Home Assistant has had an alert card since the September frontend release, but it was built for the home and security dashboards and there was no way to add it from the UI. That changes in 2026.11. Aidan Timson (timmo001) wrote two pull requests that give the card a visual editor, put it in the card picker and add a matching badge. The first was me
