2026.7: Automations that speak your language

[crzynik (Nicolas Mowen)]

I am not sure how HA would know which temperature sensors are valid and which are not, and it is not a valid assumption that each room only has one. For example, in some rooms we only have one true temperature sensor and the rest are attached to things like windows / door sensors that also happen to measure temperature. Of course we would not want these to be used in the overall area temperature.

But then we have other areas which truly just have multiple multi-sensors that do have valid temperatures, I personally just average them into a single entity which is used in graphs and badges.

I don't see a reasonable way that the automation engine or HA in general would be able to know which sensors are not good data to be used. To me that seems like a simple job of the admin to either:

1. disable those entities if they are not used for anything anyway
2. remove the temperature entities from the area, or create a separate area for those specific ones so they are not pulled in

Regardless, the UI makes it pretty clear that multiple entities are being included in that area's temperature.

[cerebrate (Alistair Young)]

Well, okay, let me give you some of my assumptions here.

I'm figuring that for the super-simple "dumb smart home" setups, there'll probably be just one or a few basic temperature sensors^[1] all relevant to the area, and the new system is fine for those.

And then there are the complex setups, like mine, which have multiple sensors some of which need to be averaged in, and some of which don't, and some of which aren't related to the room at all (CPU temps on servers, NAS hard drive temperatures, 3D printer nozzles, etc., etc.). I have a whole bunch of wiring using Magic Areas to filter and build room averages, and then Node-RED to factor the results together into tweaked values I can call "whole-house thermostatic averages", and that feeds the thermostat integrations, and so forth. Now, for myself, this is all shiny. I know exactly which values are right for which usages, so I can just drill down through the devices and entities and pick the exact right one I want.

But the ideas the blog post puts forward, that people who aren't me and don't know or care about how all that complexity-wiring works should just be able to pick "Area: Bedroom"/"Temperature changed" and have Home Assistant do the right thing are pretty compelling to me - because there are other people living here without my HA-instance knowledge for whom that would be a boon.

Now you're right: HA doesn't know which sensors are valid or which aren't. But in the above scenario, we've at least one person who built the system and does know all of that, and so can tell it where to get the data from. In fact, this is already done for some things. Here's a look at an existing part of the configuration popup for an area:

So there is a place where you can tell an area which sensors accurately represent the area values, for those two classes! It's just not used for this; I think they only apply to voice assistant questions.

So that's my ask. Give us the ability to, for each area and per device class, specify a particular sensor (or sensors) that accurately represent the area state. If it's not overridden, use the existing method: it'll work fine on small and simple systems. But adding this rescues the feature for complex-system use by people, non-admin users, who aren't fully intimate with their details, and that's worth doing.

ETA: Actually, as the admin user, it's also kind of convenient for me to be able to say "use the canonical temperature of this area" in automations, because then if I change the underlying wiring that computes it, I only have to change one setting in the area config rather than however many automations use it. But that's just gravy.

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1. Or whatever kind of sensor, temperature is just an illustration. ↩︎

[NathanCu (Nathan Curtis)]

Assign area to the sensor and apply a label that denotes foo.

Then, sensor., filter on in area, and with label foo. Done.

No area is not just for Voice/Assist.

[crzynik (Nicolas Mowen)]

@cerebrate

existing part of the configuration popup for an area:

My understanding is that this is not used for voice, it is used for the default dashboard / area dashboard section.

Using these as the default for area in automations seems reasonable enough as a better default, but the UI for automations does make it clear how many devices are involved, the area-temp/humidity sensors config is also not really given to the user (at least not existing users) as I had never known about this and all of mine area unset.

To me this seems like a good refinement that can be made for better default behavior, but this is already a solvable problem by an admin and the UI is clear what is happening.

[cerebrate (Alistair Young)]

I don't dispute that it's a solvable problem for an admin, a clear UI for people who know to poke things and look, or that any of us here can't work around it six times before breakfast.

It's the people who aren't me, you, or us (meaning people likely to be found on this community site)^[1] that I want it to be easier to make work well for.

ETA: Okay, y'know, let me do this as a user story because it might help clarify my endgame here.

I, for whatever reason, am in Osaka on business. This puts me some 6,500 miles and 14 hours away from home. I can, of course, VPN in to deal with technical crises, but like Bartleby the Scrivener, I would prefer not to. Lengthy international phone calls in the middle of the night are right out.

My wife is at home in our smart home in Wichita. This being the summer, it is bloody hot, and she would like the fan next to her chair to turn on whenever the living room gets too warm, which it currently doesn't.

She is familiar with the dashboards I've set up and some of the very basics of Home Assistant, but by no means all or even most. Certainly not the intricacies of our local quite-complex setup, because, well, I'm the former system administrator and software dev in the family and she, while a woman of many talents, isn't.

She should be able to achieve this by knowing about "Living Room"->"Temperature Crosses Threshold"->"Smart Outlet To Right Of Couch"->"Turn On".

She should not, to any significant degree (beyond, say, "I want to automate something"), need to know about how Home Assistant represents any of these things except for the basic notions that houses have floors, floors have rooms, and rooms have stuff in 'em.

(That's what this new automation editor sounds like its promising, and all I want to do is solve whatever's left in the way of it fulfiling that promise.)

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1. Meaning they don't know about the technical details of "sensors" and "entities", etc., they don't care about the technical details, and being expected to do either will nuke their Smart Home Acceptance Factor. ↩︎

[GH2user]

I haven't installed the latest version yet, but are all temperature sensors in an area considered for these new triggers? That seems very bad design if I look for instance at my living room sensors; airQ_living a proper temperature device, a device temperature of the door sensor, a temperature of the nuc running HA and a temperature of the tablet on the wall.
Averaged that would never be correct. I was expecting this trigger to use the proper set area temperature sensor as reported on the new Home-overview page and as pointed out above.

[csdstudio78]

Something I noticed immediately, the primary accent color changed and it reduces legibility/accessibily with add-on cards that utilize white text over the new accent color. See below using bubble-card, same problem with other mods.

[cerebrate (Alistair Young)]

It's not averaging; it seems to have an option which lets you pick whether the trigger fires when each, the first of, or all of the sensors in the area meets the condition:

[Didgeridrew]

@cerebrate

... let me do this as a user story because it might help clarify my endgame here.

I think you have demonstrated the desired functionality, but it's not going to go anywhere from here... if you want any action beyond just gabbing you need to open a Feature Request in the proper location.

[oliof (Harald)]

I don't think 56 devices in one area are a lot.

My only partially assistive home has 38 devices in one area (kitchen),
28 devices in another (living room),
18 in a third (office).

Add to that 25 in the basement and 21 I have assigned to "house" because they're doing house wide functions, and for a given automation, I easily have to select entities from 1 to 3 areas, adding up to a bunch to find.

Living room and office are a loft like floor (no room division), so it would be easy to assume that could add up to 66 devices. If you have smart plugs, thermometers, smart lights, smart switches, motion and presence sensors, esphome based speakers, plant humidity sensors, door/window sensors, things add up rather quickly.

[mikefrantz]

After updating from 2026.6 to 2027.7.1 I cannot get any of the matter integration to work. I’ve uninstalled the update and reinstalled it twice and still, the integration will not work.

[boheme61 (JC)]

@cerebrate

She should be able to achieve this by knowing about "Living Room"->"Temperature Crosses Threshold"->"Smart Outlet To Right Of Couch"->"Turn On"

then tell her before you leave home , you don't expect i should know how you set up your system, even thou i build my own system ( For my home )
.... which im sure you have no idea of, how my heating/ventialtion system works

I skimmed through some of you post, and to me it's clearly that you should think about building your system/autotomations/scripts etc and using i.e labels as suggested above, but most of all, You can't expect anyone should be able to do anything correct in your system, if you have not Communicated it ... Teach Your Wife to use YOUR system,
Im still sure i wouldn't know either what to do in your system to cool down the temperature, because you didn't Covered for that scenario, with i.e a simple "press Button"

[boheme61 (JC)]

Maybe you have another idea of using i.e Area, i know most people sees it as an fysical, but in fact it's not !
I have 3 separate Areas in my LivingRoom( Yes LivingRoom is also an "Area" ) , obviously no same Devices/Entities in 2-3 Areas
i.e TechWall ( Is an "Area" in the LivingRoom ), and non of those Device there have anything to do with i.e Lights, Nor Climate. In the LivingRoom

There are Tons of Ways one can build an HomeAssistant System, and only you know How you does it

[Starkman68]

Please Help. How do I do this in the new GUI? I have a new button I need to set up but the only options on the device in the new GUI is about the battery? It is a three-button Zigbee device. The screen shot is from an existing automation.

[knuti1960]

To add the trigger by target will fail, you will only get the battery entities. Add the trigger by type (see screenshot) and scroll to "device" (screenshot). There you will find it:

[Starkman68]

Vielen Dank

I had trouble finding this option. This new GUI is not better for some things!

[oliof (Harald)]

It's actually a mix for me.

In addition to the aforementioned "House" area, the heating system is an area with the heat pump outside unit in the garden, inside unit and hot water tank and pumps in the cellar, but control for hot water circulation in the bathroom, and reference thermostat and control unit in the living room .....

And yeah @NathanCu will tell me to use more labels (Which I also do, for other things, i.e. mark which kind of battery a battery powered device has if replaceable).

[NathanCu (Nathan Curtis)]

Yes. Yes I will.

[cerebrate (Alistair Young)]

@boheme61

but most of all, You can't expect anyone should be able to do anything correct in your system, if you have not Communicated it ... Teach Your Wife to use YOUR system,
Im still sure i wouldn't know either what to do in your system to cool down the temperature, because you didn't Covered for that scenario, with i.e a simple "press Button"

This is a big difference in our approaches, seems like. The way I see it, if someone else here can't sit down at my dashboards and figure out how to do the thing they want to do, that's on me.

'Cause designing the front end for my home is part of my job - as the admin/system-builder - and if people can't use it without admin-level knowledge of the system, that means I let the implementation details leak, ergo my design is crap and I suck at my job.

(That's what all my many, many automations and scripts and scenes and pyscript and hand-coded integrations and, yes, labels are for, belike.)

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The analogy, in this case, is a word processor.

If you are the developer of a word processor, and are implementing the bold text feature, you should (hopefully) want to make life simple for the person using it to write. Obviously they need to know how to use the tool: in this case, specifically, how to select text, find the formatting toolbar, and click the little button with a B on it.

But if you suggested that, for example, they need to know the details of how the operating system manages fonts (and falls back on its own rendering if there isn't a prerendered boldface font for a face), how formatting options are stored in the text buffer, how the printer driver implements output of such text vis-a-vis the video driver, how bold interacts with other formatting options code-side (Can you turn on Bold and Light at the same time? Should you?), etc., etc., I think we can all agree that you'd be designing one shitty word processor.

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But at this point we're getting into design philosophy, and should maybe take it to another thread.

[cerebrate (Alistair Young)]

For myself, at the moment I'm mostly treating areas as physical areas because using them that way helps with my dashboards, but systems that aren't localized/affect the whole house are outside any area.

(I do, pace @NathanCu, use labels to indicate system membership both for those and for components of systems that happen to be in different areas. All the environment sensors, for example, are labeled "hvac" regardless of which area they're in, as are other heating/cooling/ventilation components.)