State of the Union 2019: Recap

[system]

On November 13, 2019, 150 Home Assistant community members gathered at ING in Amsterdam for the Home Assistant State of the Union 2019.

That evening, Paulus Schoutsen (founder Home Assistant) and Pascal Vizeli (founder hass.io) presented what Home Assistant is up to, why we’re doing what we’re doing and what we got planned.

Video of the event is embedded below (it starts at 7:12):

Thanks

The State of the Union could not have been possible without the time and energy of the following people:

• ING for hosting us once again ❤️
• Erik-Jan Riemers for organizing – Rockstar ⭐️
• Frenck for managing the livestream
• Arjan Vroege for assisting the team

Highlights

We’re #10 open-source project in the world

GitHub posted their State of the Octoverse, listing Home Assistant as the tenth biggest project in the last year based on the number of contributors.

This is especially impressive because all the other things on the list are related to, or maintained by billion dollar companies.

Top 10 biggest open-source projects.

Home Assistant around the world ❤️

Improved Scenes

In Home Assistant 0.102 we’re launching a new scene editor. We’re also adding two scene services scene.apply and scene.create. First one allows you to apply a scene without prior defining it, the second one allows you to create a scene on the fly.

iOS app

@robbiet480 has submitted the new and updated iOS app to the app store and it will be available soon.

Source code

Android app

We have released a new Android app! Download it here. It’s being developed by @CedrickFlocon and we’re already seeing a ton of other contributors jump in. Awesome!

Source code

OAuth2 Account Linking

We’ve made it easier in Home Assistant for integrations to use OAuth2 account linking. This is available starting Home Assistant 0.102. Somfy is the first partner to use it.

It works using a small cloud service provided by Home Assistant Cloud. It is available to all users for free, no cloud account necessary.

Check the updated developer documentation if you want to add OAuth2 account linking to an integration.

Teamed up with Almond: privacy-preserving virtual assistant

We’ve teamed up with the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab to bring Almond to Home Assistant users. Almond has been upgraded with Home Assistant integration and users can now talk to Almond via the Lovelace UI.

You can run this standalone, as a hass.io add-on or via a version hosted in the cloud by Stanford.

Short description of what Almond is.

For more information, check the announcement blog.

Ada, voice assistant powered by Home Assistant

We have introduced a new project called Ada. Ada is a voice assistant that outsources all processing to the speech-to-text (new!), conversation and text-to-speech integrations in Home Assistant. You can pick your own providers for each integration.

You can run this standalone or as a hass.io add-on.

For more information, check the announcement blog.

Source code.

Architectural overview of Ada.

Voice for Home Assistant Cloud

Nabu Casa has introduced a new beta service providing speech-to-text and text-to-speech services to Home Assistant Cloud subscribers powered by Azure Cognitive Services. This will make it easy to get started with Ada or use it to send spoken notifications to speakers in your house.

Z-Wave

We’ve been working with the Open Z-Wave developers on a new solution that will allow us to migrate to the new Open Z-Wave 1.6 relase and make it easier to stay up to date in the future.

We’re expecting to launch an MVP soon. This effort is driven by @cgarwood.

Source code

Frenck is joining Nabu Casa

Frenck will be joining Nabu Casa as the fourth employee working full-time on Home Assistant.

“If I could describe my dream job, it would be being a full-time open source developer; Helping the world to become a better place by dedicating my time & knowledge to create & innovate open source software solutions. Allowing everybody on this earth the privilege to enjoy those things for free.” – Franck Nijhof (Frenck) on frenck.dev

Create automations using your voice

We have been able to leverage Almond’s neural network to allow users to generate automations using natural language. This means that you can now create an automation by telling Home Assitant to “turn on the lights when I get home” and we’ll convert it to the appropriate automation in Home Assistant.

Source code.

 Screenshot of the create automation dialog.

Share the love ❤️

Home Assistant is the community and the community is Home Asssitant. Help us spread the Home Assitant love, help others and share your knowledge on YouTube, blogs and other media.

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/11/22/state-of-the-union/

[rogersmj]

I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear of the upcoming Z-Wave improvements. I had to switch back to using SmartThings as my Z-Wave hub, because the Z-Wave management currently in HA is so dated and difficult to use (I was having a lot of problems with device compatibility). So currently I’m dependent on a cloud integration for the most basic thing – lights. Ick.

[finity]

I hear people saying this but my experience is completely different. I don’t have a lot of zwave stuff (23 nodes - half battery powered) but aside from the self-inflicted “entity_registry” kerfuffle my zwave network is great I don’t find it difficult to use in the least.

The only thing that I have that can’t fully be utilized is my Aeotec Doorbell 6 because we aren’t running OZW 1.6. But it still generally works good. I just can’t distinguish which door button has been pressed but both will still send a signal to HA to use for a generic “someone is at the door” message.