Home Assistant Unveils 2024.2

Home Assistant has released version 2024.2 of its home automation platform, bringing a range of new features and improvements. This release continues the focus on voice control, following last year’s “The Year of the Voice” campaign.

One of the standout features of this release is the improved drag and drop support for automations. Users can now easily reorder triggers, conditions, and actions in the automation editor, and can even drag elements into other nested elements. This makes it much easier to create and customize automations in Home Assistant.

The history dashboard has also received an update, allowing users to export the data they are viewing as a CSV file. This makes it easier to analyze and visualize the data in other tools.

The Assist feature, Home Assistant’s voice assistant, has also seen some improvements. Error responses have been enhanced to provide more meaningful information when something is not understood. Users can also now set custom Assist responses in automations using the sentence trigger, allowing for more personalized interactions with the voice assistant.

In terms of integrations, this release includes a whopping 21 new integrations, making it the largest release to date. Some notable additions include support for AirTouch 5 ducted air conditioning systems, control of Bang & Olufsen Beolab and Beosound devices, and monitoring of Epion air quality sensors.

Other improvements in this release include better error handling in form fields, support for inverting the behavior of switch entities, and expanded diagnostic information and actions for Matter devices.