Home Assistant’s next era begins now | The Verge

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How Home Assistant plans to transition from an enthusiast platform to a mainstream consumer product.
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See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
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See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
How do you solve the problem of growing a popular smart home platform committed to open-source, open-standard ideals into something bigger that stays true to those ideals? You create a foundation. At least, that’s the approach Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen has chosen.
This week, Home Assistant announced it is now part of the Open Home Foundation. The newly formed non-profit will own and govern all of Home Assistant and its related entities. Its creators and inaugural board members — Schoutsen, Guy Sie, Pascal Vizeli, and J. Nick Koston — all work on Home Assistant, and the foundation has no other members so far.
In a press release, the foundation stated its aim is “to fight against surveillance capitalism, and offer a counterbalance to Big Tech influence, in the smart home — by focusing on privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart home users.”
A community-built, open-source smart home platform, Home Assistant differs from its major “big tech” competitors — such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, because it offers four things simultaneously: local control of your smart home that can be faster and more reliable than the cloud: authority over and access to all your data; compatibility with almost every connected gadget — regardless of protocol or manufacturer; and the ability to make them work together. While many competitors offer some of these, few offer all.
“I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale.”
Home Assistant is known for its unmatched power and flexibility, but so far the platform, which has an estimated one million users, has struggled to reach the mainstream. Home Assistant can have a steep learning curve, especially when compared to the relative simplicity of a platform like Alexa or Apple Home. Onboarding devices can be complicated, the UI has lots of room for improvement, and integrations can be hit or miss.
“Home Assistant is no one’s first smart home platform,” says Schoutsen. “When people outgrow their existing systems and want more advanced control, that’s when they come to Home Assistant.” But he sees that the platform is at a tipping point.
With the arrival of the industry-backed smart home standard Matter (with which Home Assistant is heavily involved), smart home adoption is pushing into the mainstream. Home Assistant wants to stay swimming alongside Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and Google, all of which it’s been competing with in the smart home for roughly a decade now. Home Assistant has never accepted investors, says Schoutsen, and he sees a foundation as the best way to grow.
Schoutsen outlined the platform’s future roadmap at its annual State of the Open Home presentation on Saturday, April 20th. In an interview ahead of the live stream, he told The Verge about some of the bigger changes planned for Home Assistant following this transition:
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More Works With Partners
The Home Assistant Works With Program, launched in 2022, is expanding to partner with more smart home companies and certify their products as guaranteed to Work With Home Assistant. Partners include Leviton, Aqara, Ultraloq, Jasco, Third Reality, and more. “The label means we can guarantee it works with Home Assistant,” says Schoutsen. Each features the type of connection it works with and there will be no cloud-only partners. “We only allow a cloud badge as a secondary badge besides a local badge. [For cloud-only products] we can’t guarantee it will work if they turn off the cloud one day.”
More voice control hardware
Work on a locally-based Home Assistant voice assistant that began last year is continuing, and a Home Assistant voice assistant hardware device is being developed. “We want to make our own hardware that people can put in their homes and replace Google and Amazon with,” says Schoutsen. The device should arrive at the end of this year, he says, hinting at a future screen-based device. “We are looking at screens, nothing official to announce, but we’re looking at E-ink. We don’t need color, as we don’t need ads.”
Home Assistant is exploring incorporating generative AI into home automation but, crucially, using local processing. “Some people are using ChatGPT with Home Assistant, but it’s so slow,” says Schoutsen. They are working with Nvidia to use its Jetson platform to power LLMs for Home Assistant.
The collective goal of all these efforts is to move Home Assistant toward becoming a more mainstream, out-of-the-box option for smart home users. “We want to be a consumer brand,” says Schoutsen. “You should be able to walk into a Home Depot and be like, ‘I care about my privacy; this is the smart home hub I need.’”
The foundation will also advocate for the development of “better” smart home products, says Schoutsen, “Devices with local APIs and that are built sustainably. Because there needs to be products compatible with Home Assistant that you can trust.”
Schoutsen, who started Home Assistant in 2013 with a Philips Hue smart lighting bridge, a Python script, and a mission to control his lights any way he wanted to, sees the foundation as necessary to both protect Home Assistant and move it forward. “I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale,” he says. The new owner