A general reminder: Beta week is not designed to fully overhaul a new feature, but to identify bugs that may be introduced with the update.
If you have an issue, please let us know here! However, the developers are very active in the #beta channel of our Discord server during Beta week - it’s good to hop in there if you can. To ensure things are addressed in a timely manner during Beta, be sure to also submit issues on GitHub in their proper space:
Here are this month’s Beta notes! We’re doing a ton of improvements around UX, including a new experimental dashboard with area view! Highlights I think are important this month:
Do you have all 5000 entities assigned to areas? Many of mine pre-date areas and I’ve only bothered to assign areas to ones I’m interested in (and new ones that prompt me to assign an area during setup). Also, some device entities aren’t shown in the existing automatic dashboard already (e.g. ones in the diagnostic section of a device page). So it may not be as overwhelming as it seems at first blush.
/edit
And oh yeah big +1 on continued conversation, and initiating a convo too!
(Friday, context? You get context by assigning your things where they go. If it can remotely be accessed or summarized or otherwise read by an LLM yes it’s got an area, probably 5-7 labels too and At LEAST three aliases if it’s exposed to assist.)
Like I said the auto dash… Stops. Not slow. It STOPS.
Nice additions for those of us that want our homes to seem self-aware in the ability to continue the conversation without needing the wake word every time and being able to have the Assistant initiate the conversation. I’m sure there are a few other goodies in there that I will like.
It SHOULD be under the Support category. If you don’t see it, click on Channels & Roles at the top of the channel list, then click on Browse Channels. You can add the support channels there if they are not checked.
No i haven’t. I don’t run the betas. (time constraint) I saw this one and…
Personally I’ll immediately turn it off. But yeah they need to test the limits because of the discussion we’re having. What dev thinks normal limits are are about to go out the freaking window. See Friday.
LOTS of areas
LOTS of labels.
LOTS of aliases all stuffed full of rich text.
Yeah I’d run that by Madelena and make absolutely sure they know what LLM is about to do to the metadata in the system because it’s about to matter ALOT
a) it’s currently opt-in much like the way the we did Sectionals.
b) this is intentional, so that we can figure out the problems you are mentioning.
c) this release we are also removing the LLM’s need to review the entire state of your home to speed up its response rates - I am not sure this is listed clearly somewhere yet, but Paulus talked about it in yesterday’s calls with the Creator Network.
Send me details I need tk see that change that could be very very breaking. To be clear hes right. Summary is important. But it could be very breaking.
I’m double checking with Paulus and also going to try to review the blog notes again here soon. I got some social copy to draft for a blog post today right quick, though.
I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum from Nathan.
I don’t use areas. I think of my home in terms of systems. Heating system. Pumps. Temperatures. Where those things are located is secondary. Good examples include the box running HA, or my NAS servers. It’s irrelevant where these are physically located. They’re used everywhere.
Even something as hyper-local as a light is part of the bigger picture of what lighting is currently in use. I’d find it easier to see and manipulate a list of all lights, than skip around by area to see which ones are on or which ones I want to change.
I can’t be the only one who doesn’t have much use for areas. For one thing, not everyone lives in a space which has a lot of areas.
I’m not saying areas and labels aren’t useful. Just don’t build anything into HA which assumes everyone uses them the same way you do.
No one uses this product exactly the same way. That isn’t hyperbole, either. No one has the same home, same devices, or even same dashboard needs. There will be times when something is put into Home Assistant that isn’t for everyone; I am confident that every community member doesn’t use every feature out there.
You indeed are not the only one who doesn’t use Areas. However, most people who are outgrowing other ecosystems are used to these things. This dashboard experiment (emphasis on experiment) is to specifically find an answer for the overwhelming amount of information that appears on the current Overview dashboard.
I hear that this may not be for you, and that’s totally fine. For your example of servers, here’s how I would personally end up doing that: I’d simply create an area called “servers”. An area doesn’t necessarily have to be “real”, it’s just another method of organization for people’s homes.
@CaptTom, if you were to have an Overview page organized, how would you expect that to look exactly for you? What would you change about the current Overview page to make it better for you or do you like some things? Do you currently use the Overview page? These will help me better express your feedback to the team.
