Episode 231 - What’s So Great About Home Assistant?

Speaker A: Hey everybody, it's Richard. On this episode of the Smart Home Show, Adam and I dive deep into Home Assistant. He and I are both holdouts on Home Assistant, but nearly everyone around us in this space these days seems to be using or at least trying it out. What's so great about Home Assistant and what moves are they making in the DIY and pro spaces? We have the perfect person to walk through it all with us, Paula Stautson, the founder and creator of Home Assistant. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Speaker B: Sam. Mhm.

Speaker A: Hey everyone, I am Richard Guenther from the Digital Media Zone. Welcome to the Smart Home Show. I'm joined by my co host Adam justice from Connect Sense. As usual. Hey Adam.

Speaker B: Hey, good to see you.

Speaker A: Good to see you. And we are delighted to be joined today by the founder and creator of Home Assistant, Paula Stockson. Hi Paulas, how are you?

Speaker C: Good, good. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Very glad to have you on. And uh, I have to ask the requisite question. Did I pronounce your name adequately?

Speaker C: Good enough, good enough.

Speaker A: I've been trying so hard. Okay, well, before we get this, uh, party started, Adam.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we usually start the show with a question. So the question I'll ask Richard and you as well, uh, how many different smart home ecosystems do you have actively running in your home? Actively, not just for testing.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think this is pretty relevant considering what we're going to be talking about now. I guess the question is what's an ecosystem? And I have a number of bridges down in my basement. One for for example, Ring one, for example. Ah, Hugh. But are those really ecosystems? I think of ecosystems as something like smart things and um, you know, the different major assistants from the big companies. So I'm going to go down that path and say that I have two. I actively use Apple's ecosystem, the HomeKit ecosystem, for primary control around my home. And then I also use Google Assistant in some cases, uh, with Nest products you actually have to use the Google app to set things up. And so I do have some Google devices around the home as well. So I think my number is two. How about you, Adam?

Speaker B: I would say two to three. Um, so mine are Amazon and uh, Apple's ecosystems. Um, and then I would say, you know, a smattering of matter. Uh, for now, nothing. Um, I haven't gone too deep, uh, into, into matterland yet. I'm waiting for all the, the kinks, uh, to get worked out. Uh, and I do have Google stuff for testing, but I won't count that

Speaker A: per year qualifier Fair enough. Okay. And palace, how about you?

Speaker C: So my main drive is obviously Home Assistant. Surprise. Uh, from Home Assistant you can forward everything to Google and Apple. So any device you have in Home Assistant can be forwarded to also Amazon. These ecosystems. I have an Apple HomePod set up in my bedroom mainly because I got, uh, blinds that were based on matter over threat and I needed a border router over there. So I was using HomePod mini as a threat border router. Um, I did just disconnect my last Google Mini or Nest Mini that I was using because the shopping list feature got changed again. Or I'm not sure exactly where it is now. And we've been building our own voice assistant with Home Assistant. We're going to launch that later this year and we added shopping list support. So I was like, no more Google there. So, yeah. Two.

Speaker A: All right, it sounds like you win, Adam, if we call more winning. I don't know. Probably not. Probably not. All right, well, if you want to submit a question for us to open the show with, you can send questions to us with the hashtag AskADim and Richard on social media or you can send it to us at feedbackmarthome fm.

Speaker B: All right, so diving in, uh, for you, Paulus, we'd like to know a little bit more about Home Assistant. I think Richard and I are, uh, familiar with it, but neither of us are heavy users of it or whatever. So I sort of said to you when we were chatting before the show, here's your chance to, to bring us on board, convince us. So what's the 32nd pitch on what Home Assistant's all about?

Speaker C: Um, yeah, let me see. Because I find it always difficult where to kind of slide into the experience level of people. Right. Like you guys are familiar with Amazon and all that stuff, but, you know, Home Assistant is a smart home system with a focus on local control and privacy. And it's built around the idea that you are fully in control of your own data. So all your data is stored locally. You have full API access. People can build anything on top. It's not, you know, if you look at other ecosystems, only their hardware software can use your data. We have a very big community of people that are building stuff on top of Home Assistant because you're in control. Um, we don't like clouds, but we don't ban them. Like, for example, take a NAS thermostat. You know, they store your data in the cloud, it's cloud controlled. We pull that data into Home Assistant, bring it back home, all your automations On NAS data will run locally. Uh, decisions to control your NAS will be made locally, but we will work with any ecosystem as long as somebody wants to build it. And that actually brings us to the second point is that we're fully open source. Uh, GitHub, where all the open source work is happening, published their stats last week. We're actually the most active open source project in the world of all. Not just smart home, but all Open source on GitHub. We had 21,000 people work on Home Assistant in the last year. And the big difference between our platform and other systems is that where other systems rely on companies investing, software engineers, and they have like, you know, a business reason, uh, to integrate with other systems. Ours is community based. And being community based means that people are driven because they're using this in their house and they want to fix this and they make sure that it works really well. Even companies that no longer exist. Um, and lastly, I guess home, um, Assistant is owned by a nonprofit, the Open Home Foundation. It's a Swiss nonprofit. And that means there's no investors there. It's fully funded by users, so and certification cannot reach it. It is, uh, immune to be sold. And you know, a system that runs local, cares about users, is private, will also remain that way for like forever.

Speaker B: Okay, so in terms of the drivers and plugins that you, uh, that you create, is that all something coming from Home Assistant or the community or both?

Speaker C: I mean that's. Well, what is Home Assistant? Right? So the people that work on Home Assistant, they are contributors to Home Assistant, but they are from all over the world. So we have 50 people working full time on Home Assistant today, but 21,000 of people that are contributing. So let's take Z Wave. There's a driver called Z Wave. JS Dominique, uh, wrote it. Um, he's now, because Z Wave is so important for us, we made sure that we hired him and he's working full time on Z Wave stuff. And this is part that like we can fund for now the foundation to make sure that like every part of the smart home puzzle that is important, we provide funding for, to make sure that gets built out. So is every driver part of Home Assistant? Uh, is open source for sure. Is it built by Home Assistant? Well, it's built by our community.

Speaker B: Okay, so you know, you're hiring people. What is the, you know, as a, as a business owner myself. What's the business model as well. And like, how do you guys make money? You know, how does that all work?

Speaker C: Who needs money?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Now, so we, uh, you know, I started, let me just go back to when I started Home Assistant because I wasn't even planning on building any of this, right? I, I got the Philips Hue lights, they had a local API. I was just playing with that API. I had them turn on when the sun was setting. I realized the lights were being turned on when the sun, when I was not at home but the sun was setting. Had to add presence detection, right? And just kind of ball got rolling, rolling. And then at some point the work just got too much to kind of do in my spare time, right. It became like before work, after work, weekends. And so that's where five years into the start of Home Assistant, I started a company called Nabukasa. And what we do with Nabukasa is that we provide optional extra services. People can pay for it, they don't have to. Um, the one service is called Home Assistant Cloud. Because Home Assistant runs fully at home. It means that while you're not at home, you cannot access it. Now if you're more technical, you can set up a vpn, you can open port, forwarding, do these kind of stuff. If you don't want to deal with that, you can pay US$7 a month. And we have an end to end encrypted connection. It also allows you easy integration with Google and Amazon because those require a cloud to integrate because they're cloud to cloud integration. And the other part we do is hardware. So anyone can install Home Assistant on a virtual machine on a server. Raspberry PI. Most people don't know those words, let's be honest. So, uh, we build a box, it's called Home Assistant Green, it's $99. It's basically a Raspberry PI equivalent. It's just like a small Linux box, right? It runs the same software, um, as all the other platforms. You just don't have to do anything. It's Plug and Play and those two, the subscriptions, the hardware, they're both optional. People can always do it themselves, um, together fund the development of Home Assistant.

Speaker B: It's funny, super interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned, uh, most people don't know those things. I always tended to check out when someone would talk about m some thing that I could set up and all I would have to do is create a Docker container or put it on a Raspberry PI and just install these packages. And I had no idea what people were talking about until I got into this more. So it can be really, really intimidating.

Speaker C: Yes, yes.

Speaker A: So are you finding that you're getting the kind of conversion that you might have expected on your hardware, then is that expanding your audience the way you might have expected it to?

Speaker C: Uh, yes. Not actually just the hardware, but also the software has been made a lot easier over the years. So I always told people until I get paid, uh, unless I get paid, I will not build a configuration user interface because it's very hard and challenging. But you know, now it's been six years that I've been getting paid. So we've built a lot of strides. Like you can update the operating system and Home Assistant through the user interface. It makes automatic backups, it can roll back if an update fails. All these things that you expect from a off the shelf box in your house, be it a Philips Hue hub or a HomePod mini. Right? Like they will never fail an update. Now that's the same thing with home, like that's just happening in the user interface, is it? Uh, we've always tried to set our vision to reach the next level of users, right. So the initial users were Linux system administrators that could install Python application and write text files. Today we have people whose hobby is smart home using home assistant and not just people that are building home labs. And we see that those people, they will only use mobile phones, they won't even use the desktop and they just want to use the automation editor on their phone. And we're making sure that those kind of things work and that people are understanding and like we make dashboards easier. But we are even now, nowadays even going one step further where we're no longer just focusing on the users of our platform as in the admin that configures the platform, but actually the secondary users. Because if your smart home system like is not accepted in your house, right. Like we call this the home approval factor, then you know, that's, that's the people that you're facilitating and that's the people that have to uh, live with our product. So we're really making sure that they are also having a good experience.

Speaker B: Yep, Richard and I both know about that. The approval factor.

Speaker A: Yeah, all too well. And you know, it's funny, you've, you've kind of naturally followed the, the way that I had expected this conversation would go because I think that whether it's fair or not, over the years Home Assistant has had a reputation of being very techie, being very geeky. And I think you just admitted uh, that at the beginning it really was and you've been making big moves to get away from that, um, as kind of prep for this discussion, I went to go see what your latest demo dashboard looks like. And I mean, it's kind of up there competing with the likes of what you'd see with the home app or with Google Home and things like that. It's a very familiar, but even perhaps more thorough experience than you might get from those platforms. So that's a great move to see because, uh, I have always been concerned, uh, and this is really my background about that user experience and how if something's just a little bit too unapproachable for the household, then it doesn't matter how much I like it if it's just going to piss off my partner.

Speaker C: Right, right. Yeah.

Speaker A: So that's, I'm really glad to see that. Now, on the admin side, though, I still do hear people talk a lot about having to update files and that, uh, that maintenance can get pretty fiddly, that if you add a device, you may end up with like 100 entities flooding your environment. And so what kind of moves are you making to maybe simplify or streamline that admin experience too?

Speaker C: So I think the challenge that we are having is that Home Assistant is so flexible. And if you ask Home Assistant or the community, is this possible, the answer is never no. The answer is yes. But follow this tutorial and these, like, YouTube video and these shelf scripts and do this and it's, it's wild and it ends up working and then it breaks and you're like, okay, Home Assistant, why is it so complicated? If you ask the same question for, um, an alternative smart home system, the answer is just no. There's no way out. And you just accept that fact, you start tackling the next problem. So for us to make everything super simple is going to be hard because also, to be honest, a lot of manufacturers are working against us, right? Because they believe that they have the sole rights to the data of the user because they built the device, uh, that the data is capturing. So sometimes we see some friction there as well. The way I see it is that we have more and more stuff is becoming easier to use, and more and more of these elements, like our automation editor or dashboards, will graduate into being like, this is super easy. If we look at individual devices or APIs or ecosystems that we integrate, there will always be ones that are just going to be a pain. Um, but as we are growing as Home Assistant, also with the foundation, we see a lot of more companies take us more seriously, see us as a legit player in the market. We are seeing a lot of partnership, outreach that we are working with the engineering teams to validate their devices, fix bugs, make sure that the products work well and give teller to our community. Like, hey, we work with a cara, for example. We tested their logs and their matter over thread locks work great with home assistant. Um, you can buy this one and feel confident. And of course this takes a lot of time. There's a lot of IoT devices out there. And so we always bet big on smart home standards because it's easier to, you know, validate a standard and then have everybody like follow those rules than I know talking to a vendor that has their own API. But yeah, that's one of the ways, for example, we're trying to get these integrations to a level that is very acceptable.

Speaker B: You kind of hit on what, what my next question was. So, you know, I come from a device manufacturer, um, background. You know, we, we build our own devices as well as stuff for, for other uh, companies. So I'm curious when it comes to integrating devices into the platform, like what are some of the challenges you're seeing and kind of what's the spectrum from sort of what you said, manufacturers that are reaching out, playing nice to um, you know, really having to fight an uphill battle to get stuff to support it.

Speaker C: Right. Well, so I think it's always the slightly smaller companies that reach out to us. Although we did also work with for example like uh, Leviton. I think that bigger companies, they just do their own thing, right? They have always done their own thing. They don't really want to play nice. Matter being an exception here. I would say that like for the first time, multiple companies that are very big are collaborating on something. But you tend to see that, um, for the manufacturer that makes like a hub with multiple lights or something, they see themselves as being the owner of that ecosystem and they want to lock everything down because they see the business opportunity of adding one more feature to their ecosystem and then they should be the only one to sell a plug. But for a user, they don't see it that way. It's just their lights and they have plugs and TVs and thermostats and they want everything to work together and they don't want to wait for this one manufacturer to build all that parts of that ecosystem. So they want more openness. And I think this is just in a way a friction always between what the user wants and what is the best for a business in like keeping the user the value that you capture, all the value that you generate. Right. And I think matter is actually opening that up a lot. Right. Matter is a local API. It works over WI fi, works over threat, it forces. It's basically forced on the. Because you know, Google and Apple have so much power. Right. Like every phone has matter. Today you look at like the potential to who you can sell a device. Well, matter kind of is appealing there. People are building a lot of local stuff which is good. But I think I also see a lot of companies kind of not liking it. Right. And they're trying to find ways to work around it.

Speaker A: And yeah, I honestly have never understood that business model. What these companies don't seem to understand, and I think this is very short sighted on their part, is that they're ultimately spending more money if they have to create and maintain all the software that does all the stuff to keep up with all the environments. And if they can create a product instead that is addressable either locally or through the cloud or what have you and doesn't just depend on them being the one that gives you that button to push. Um, they ultimately reduce their burden on maintenance in the long run.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean that, I mean the, they don't see it from a maintenance perspective. They see it from who can I sell the next thing to? Right. Like now you have to open our app. Now we can show you another advertisement or whatever.

Speaker A: Well, right, yeah. One of the things that we didn't really get into, we've talked about it generically though is the vast, I don't know, the vast catalog of devices and uh, hubs and ecosystems and stuff that you do support. Because of all the people contributing, because of all the different interests involved in this around the world. You probably have one of the largest libraries of, I don't know if you call them plugins or drivers or what have you, but uh, device support, uh, amongst any of the competition, whether it's paid or open source or what have you.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. So we call them integrations and we have over 2000 integrations and an integration can be Z Wave which you know there's like 4500 certified Z wave devices right now. Um, it can also be Philips Hue which has like I know 2030 lights. It can also be just a startup uh, that has only one device and has an API that we have integrated. And so yeah, there's basically everything will or uh, can end up in Home Assistant. And not only, you know, we, our user base doesn't stop with just using the things that manufacturers sell. We also have this open source firmware to make your own IoT devices. And for example, we have a community member who has now already sold 50,000 mm wave presence sensors and stuff like this. This because they saw something that wasn't available through the other, through like manufacturers that are mass producing these, but that the geeky audience was very interested in and they were able to produce this and scale enough that like, you know, people can get their hands on it.

Speaker A: So I've heard of people connecting all kinds of things to Home Assistant is, do you have like a favorite obscure device that you're still kind of fascinated is, uh, available through an integration?

Speaker C: Well, so we just had toe warmers added to Home Assistant. So which is like, okay. Uh, you know, and it's, it's. That one was very fascinating. Like, okay, why did connected toe warmers exist to begin with? But we also see services like wordle was just added, right, the, the New York Times game where you have to guess the words and then you can be reminded if you're going to lose your streak or these kind of things and like, whatever you want to do with Home Assistant, be our guest, right? Like, do it. So it can really range from all, all these different things. And that's, this is actually what I like about Home Assistant is that we don't limit integrations. If a community member wants to build it, we can add it. So for example, there's public transport in a specific German city. We've added that support. There's the, the trash schedule in a region in the Netherlands. We've added that support so that people in those regions, you know, it will just pop up, they can use it and it, you know, for me, smart home is more a smart household. Right? So putting the trash outside is very much part of your smart home, for example. And so we can offer these kind of narrow features for users worldwide because they are maintained by users from those regions as well.

Speaker A: That's really cool. How do you handle products that are accessible in the cloud but don't either have local integration or you're not able to somehow reverse engineer communications and a token to create local communication?

Speaker C: I mean, well then that's just it, right? Like, that's the, uh, if it's not possible at all to access that API, then we don't. We also sometimes get in some conflicts where companies like, hey, we see that Home Assistant has an integration. We do not like that. There's like, yeah, we've, we've had some, uh, some come our way, uh, in the last few years. But you know, we, we always we remove them. Right? Like we're not going to fight because if a manufacturer wants to lock down their cloud, their API, they can find a thousand reasons how to like. It will be a cat and mouse game that we cannot win. So we prefer to just talk about it publicly saying, hey, this vendor doesn't like it and please vote with your wallet. Right. Like don't buy this kind of garage door or whatever anymore.

Speaker A: Right. So but what you just said in terms of cloud, if a vendor offers a cloud integration option but not a local option, is that something that you would consider or are you only interested in connecting locally?

Speaker C: No, no, we are not absolutists. Right. So we are very much choice. Right. So if you want to use a cloud based product and actually a lot of people, I would say most people do not start with home assistant. Right. I always tell people home assistant is everybody's second or third smart home platform, or in case of Adam, it'll be the fourth. But where, you know, you first, you start with a Google or Apple home generally because it's on your phone. Or actually people's smart home starts because they have five apps. They don't even know they have a smart home. They just have five apps from some random devices that they bought their tv, their media player, whatever. Then voice tends to bring things together into a single app. You want to use voice, uh, on your Apple or Google phone, then you start running into limitations. It can be privacy, but most often it's like device compatibility. It can be, maybe you want to see history, more powerful customizable dashboards, more powerful automations. You start searching online. How do I do this? And the answer is always home assistant. So when people come to home Assistant, they have this experience, they have a problem. We, we tend to be able to solve that problem. And then you know, they're up and running. And so but when they enter the home assistant world, they will have those hubs that might be in the cloud or um, these devices. And we need to make sure that we support all their stuff because otherwise they wouldn't even consider home assistant. And then once they're in the home assistant ecosystem, then we can start educating them in a way of like, hey, prefer cloud, prefer local. It's like something you want to put in your house for 20 years, then you know that is the only way.

Speaker B: What are some of the concerns you typically hear about security and how do you guys address those?

Speaker C: So some people say that open source is insecure because anyone can look at the source and then like they can find Bugs. But actually, from our experience, it works the other way around. We have people auditing the Home Assistant source code for free all the time. And like we have had, for example, GitHub security team did it as a team building. There was a cybersecurity, uh, firm in Australia that found like some issues and we, you know, they disclosed them to us. Uh, we, we fix them, we roll them out, it's fixed. We also pay for audits. I think that part, like, I mean, homes is very secure. The other part is that because your data is local, it means that, you know, it's a, you have a router at home, right? People cannot just access from outside into your internal network. And that's where Home Assistant lives. So if you have your, you know, there's other devices also with personal information in your network, right? These are all more secure because people first have to get through your router into your smart home or into your home network before they can get to your smart home. So even though Home Assistant itself is secure, this is an extra layer of defense.

Speaker B: All right, so I think we're going to take a quick break for some sponsors and then we'll return, um, with some more questions here.

Speaker A: All right, well, for the second half, we wanted to kind of talk about where things are going, how things are growing for you. And uh, we've already talked about this a little bit. But, you know, this might sound a little bit hyperbolic. I swear everybody I know is using or trying Home Assistant. I seem to be one of the last holdouts of the people that I talk to in the Home assistant space. And part of that is because it's taken me a good long while to focus around one ecosystem, that being HomeKit, partly because it took it a while to mature. And I have things to the point where I and my partner can fairly consistently operate things without too much problem. And uh, it doesn't just work, but it works most of the time. And I'm kind of afraid to mess with that. But it's undeniable that there's been this move where we've seen people who are not just uber geeks and instead, like you said, just general people in smart Home more interested in your product and starting to adopt your product. What do you largely attribute that to? Is that because of your investment in front end? Has it, has it been, uh, more organic, like word of mouth? Because everybody that Richard knows is using it. So Richard tries it.

Speaker C: I mean, there are many different ways, I think also when we look at Smart home, right, like the discussions We've been having about the Google, the Amazon, it's all, uh, the Apple, it's all actually been around voice, right? Like, hey, we want to voice control stuff. We want to have be able to drop. Track the drop down on my phone, like the control panel, whatever, and see these controls. And that's one part I think, where a lot of people really like Home Assistant. Where Home Assistant really shines, for example, is Energy Dashboard. We have a very nice energy dashboard. More and more people are getting solar panels, for example. Once you get solar panels, you're kind of like into this gamification of your energy usage, right? Like you want to use more energy when you have more solar, you want to get inside getting this over time time. And Home Assistant is perfect for that, right? You can see an hourly breakdown. Where did I was getting energy from the grid, from solar, how much was being used? You can break it down per device, for example. And that we see that there's uh, people that start with energy to use Home Assistant and then they're like, oh, but I can do this. Oh, I can do that. Oh, Home Assistant is in a way like the most powerful toolbox you can add. You just have to be able to then think in the problems you want to solve. And I think that's actually a bit more challenging. But I think the people around you are seeing having these problems that they find out that Home Assistant can solve for them.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, that makes sense. That makes sense. And not just for DIY people. I mean the. An integrator that Adam and I know and who in fact built Adam's home theater is just finishing up a Pro install using Home Assistant. It was his first pro job with Home Assistant. And just hearing about that was kind of fascinating to me because I don't really, uh. And again, this is just my perspective on things, but I hadn't really thought about Home Assistant as a Pro product. So can you talk about what you're seeing there? Are you seeing adoption in the Pro space? Are you actively courting the Pro space? How's that, how's that playing out?

Speaker C: So I know of like another Pro installer that is using like in Europe doing a lot of uh, stuff, always using Home Assistant then in combination with like KNX for example. And I think what Home Assistant is being used for is not the user interface. Home Assistant is being used often in Pro installations from my experience, as they as the backbone. So we pull in all the information, we sometimes massage the data, right? Like you have a measurement that is not fully correct or Sometimes in the example of knx, some things would come out as a number, but they had to be published as a boolean. Very complicated. But that's. KNX is very complicated. But they will use Home Assistant to read data and republish it on the data bus. And in the end, what most pro installers do is really install the HomeKit Bridge integration in Home Assistant and push all the data from Home Assistant into Apple Home. And then people will have the Apple home integration, they can have their homepods, these kind of things. And then you still have your light switches, of course. So the light switches can control the lights, the data can go to Home Assistant and then from there on, um, flow into your Apple home, for example.

Speaker A: So you touched on something that we didn't really explicitly discuss before, but it was something that I learned about Home Assistant only a little while ago. What you just said was that Home Assistant can act as a bridge, similar to say, for example, Hoobs or, um, Homebridge, uh, to be able to bring other devices into your Apple ecosystem.

Speaker C: Yeah, correct. Yeah. This is honestly, like, this is a marketing failure on our end. Like everybody, when nobody, everybody thinks that homebridge or Hoops, which is then like a commercial fork of Homebridge, is the only way to get this done. And it's like, no, we have this too. Like, we've done this forever. Right. We just, it's just a feature though. Right? This is the, you know, like I said, we have over 2,000 integrations. Yeah, HomeKit is one of them.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker C: Yeah, but you can put all the data you have in Home Assistant into Amazon's ecosystem, Google's ecosystem, or Apple's ecosystem, no problem at all. You could also push everything to MQTT and then write your own scripts or whatever. Right. Like, in the end, what we believe is that you're in control of your data and we're not going to limit where that goes to. Right. You can send it anywhere.

Speaker A: That's very cool. We're going to need you to define MQDT not just for our audience, but for us, I think.

Speaker B: Oh, no, I know what it is.

Speaker A: Oh, okay.

Speaker C: Uh, so, yeah, it's always, uh, hard to know what kind of level. So MQTT is a message system originally developed by IBM, but it's very common for industrial IoT and it has made its way into DIY IoT and basically you have a topic, think of it as an email address and you send data to it often. Like, is it switch on or off? And people can listen to any of those addresses as they want.

Speaker A: Got it. Okay. Uh, I've probably heard that, but I don't remember that. All right, very good.

Speaker C: If you didn't know about it, no need to learn it.

Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay, well, um, so one of the things that we, uh, wanted to talk about, and we mentioned this at the top of the show, was recently y' all joined the Z Wave alliance. So. Yeah, can, can we talk about that a little bit? Because, you know, Z Wave gets a bad rap, I think, when you see all the stuff out in stores, in retail space, focusing on, well, now matter, but also the three big ecosystems from Apple, Amazon and Google. And so you hear a lot of, well, who's using Z Wave? Well, I know a whole lot of home assistant people are, for sure.

Speaker C: Yeah. So the interesting thing with Z Wave is that it's actually very popular, but it's white labeled. So for example, ring is using Z Wave. So actually, Richard, you're having Z Wave in your house. Yeah, um, ADT, alarm.com are big vendors. The security panel space is all powered by Z Wave. And in our community, Z Wave is very popular because Z Wave is a very mature standard. Right. This is 25 years in the making. All the kinks have been solved. It is operating sub gigahertz, so it's very reliable. The 2.4 GHz space that Thread operates and Zigbee operates and Bluetooth operates and WI fi operates. Like there's a lot of stuff happening not just in your house, but your next door neighbors. So Z Wave just, they have that solved. The smart start stuff of Z Wave is awesome. Like you scan a QR code, 20 days later the device arrives at your house, you power it in, plug it in, boom. It's configured because you had already done that when you scanned the QR code. So there's a lot of cool stuff. But what I realized when looking at Z Wave is that they were kind of disappearing as a brand from the consumer space. So we see less and less manufacturers were interested in it. And so I went to the Z Wave alliance last to the member meeting, uh, in Austin earlier this year. And I was like pitching to the whole room. It's like, listen up. I want Z Wave to be like, kick ass and be out there. And it's a really good protocol. And we shouldn't just like, let this be like a implementation detail of your tech stack. I want people to know about Z Wave again. And, you know, the Z Wave alliance was like, oh, that's interesting. We want, you know, this guy, uh, to hear more from him. So yeah, they asked me to join the alliance and now, you know, we're working on Z Wave stuff from Home Assistant to do work, uh, with vendors, also to get more products in both Europe and America to work with Z Wave. We're working on, uh, we work on our own Z Wave antenna. We felt that like all Z Wave antennas out there were not big enough. So the Z Wave board actually created a reference design to make it easier to create Z, uh wave antennas. It's a, uh, big antenna that will make sure it covers your whole house. And yeah, I think there's going to be good times for Z Wave. And you know, we, we also need competition, right? I believe that everybody's hyping up matter, but if matter is the only smart home standard, then within 10 years it will be awful, right? Because then everyone is going to push all their features in there and every choice you make has downsides. And Z Wave being sub gigahertz, um, matter being based over WI fi, it's useful to have these different directions and to see and have the right, uh, solutions for the right, the right problems. Right. And we see maybe your remotes will all be Z Wave. Like we, we don't. You don't need to be stuck in one ecosystem anyway, right? So having many different ecosystems with different drivers and as long as everything comes back into the backbone of your house, Home Assistant, um, it works great.

Speaker A: So while we're talking about matter, let's talk a little bit more about how you support matter as well. On the matter side, you've been a pretty early adopter of standards as they come out. I think you were one of the first to say, yep, we're ready for 1.

Speaker B: 3.

Speaker A: And uh, of course just very recently the 14 announcement came out. Can you talk a little bit about what you're looking forward to in that and when you think you might be supporting that and just anything else that is relevant for people to know about matter, if you're doing anything differently or better than maybe other vendors are.

Speaker C: I think the one thing I definitely want to tell people when it comes to matter is to have patience. We are. Matter has been very hyped up. The Verge will write an article about every time a new spec is released, right? Like 1.4 was released yesterday or something. And like, hey, article everybody's talking about, look at this now this is coming. And the thing is it's like a trickle, uh, down. Right. So we have the specification then Home Assistant. I, uh, think Samsung is also 1.3 support already now. But of course we need Google and Apple to also be on board and only then can manufacturers be oh, now it's worthwhile for us to announce matter because you know, vacuums are coming to matter for example in 1.3. But if a vacuum manufacturer would say we support Matter today and somebody with an Apple phone will try to pair it, it wouldn't work because Apple doesn't support vacuums yet. So we got to be patient. Everything that is announced in the spec today, maybe in a year these devices will work fine. Um, that's just my kind of gotcha with matter. Right. I think it's very uh, like energy management only just got added to matter. Right. It's very early stages so measuring the power usage.

Speaker A: And that's still not in HomeKit.

Speaker C: Right? Right, yeah, no, yeah. So it will come also there but you know, who knows when? And everybody's doing AI nowadays so I hope they don't get too distracted. Um, but yeah, we are, I think the matter stuff will come. I, I, I like that it's WI FI based because it can solve a whole different set of problems than Z Wave solves. So for example, cameras can work over WI Fi and they cannot work over Z Wave. And there's other few like high data throughput things that oh, this can work over matter. Um, so there's, and I'm so all in all I think I'm pretty hopeful of matter. Multi Admin is also good. Right. We can, you are like starting out with Google or Apple and then when you move to Home Assistant you don't have to remove your devices out of your Apple home, but they just pair to Home Assistant at the same time. Which I think is really nice. I do have like a concern with matter and something that Z Wave doesn't have and it is that matter devices are connected to your network and it means that they can send your data to the Internet and we don't know what is being sent to the Internet. Right. So with Z Wave, I don't have to trust the manufacturer, I trust the protocol. With Matter we're back to having to trust every device manufacturer to do the right thing. And that might not always be the case. Right. And I feel like we, I don't know, we're seeing ads everywhere. Everybody wants to have our data and you know, you have to always read all the terms of services and the peace of mind in a way that Z Wave brings to the table is just like, oh, we don't have to talk about that part because it's just Impossible to do.

Speaker B: You mentioned AI a minute ago. How are you thinking about AI for the future of this platform? Obviously, I think it's going to be super important to not only have control and connectivity, but also making things, um, readable by AIs to solve some of the user interface problems we have within Smart Home today. So what's your thought on that as you look to forward?

Speaker C: Forward. So right now we are the platform that is best prepared for AI because we have all your data local, full API access, and if a user wants to send everything to AI, they can. And so we've been having, uh, very early on, integrations with large language models. You can use our voice assistant to talk to a large language model. It will hallucinate as you expect from a large language model. So it's, you know, it's at your own risk. Um, but also some very cool things can happen. So for example, if you're very vague, so I said the other day, I'm coming out of the shower, get my room ready, and it closed my blinds and it turned on my lights, because that's kind of what it concluded from the initial command. And I think that that's very cool. That's also not how I would ever talk to my voice assistant, because I wouldn't trust it to do the right thing. But I think that what we really want is the next level is in a way more being more aware of how you use your house. So the context of how you live in and be able to help you use the technology that you have access to. I think the, uh, you know, I said before, home assistance is the best toolkit that you can have in your house. Well, the people don't have the imagination what they can do with this. And I feel like AI should be able to say, hey, I see that you use your house in a certain way. Maybe we can make that better for you. For example, you always turn on the lights when you go to the restroom at night. Well, we can turn on the lights automatically at the low brightness. Oh, that's possible. Yeah. Then get XYZ or these kind of things. Anyway, my ultimate, my ultimate AI dream. I don't even know if it's possible. Eventually probably will, but like, you know how like sometimes you go to an Airbnb and they have like a whole rule book, like all the things you have to follow? Well, like that. But for your own smart home, like, I want the lights to turn on at the low brightness when I move in the corridor at night. And I just want to write it in plain English, I want to share that with my partner that she can write there, like, you know, also make rules and then let the uh, AI decide how that's going to control home assistant, how that's going to be smart, how that is happening. I think we are right now so focused on like, you know, you're mentioning entities before ratchet, which is like uh, a representation of data points, right? Like people are diving into their data points and what is this, what is that? And they are measuring like, oh, if this, the lux value gets over this, then like do that. And that makes it very inaccessible to most people. Right. And so AI will make it these kind of things accessible. And then um, are we going to have the real, I mean the next level from the rulebook, which I think is for the home automation, the ultimate level. But the what people really want is their Jarvis, right? Like you come home, um, how are you feeling? Or just someone that's always listening along and can chime in because it's something that the house can help you with or something. Bring you a beer, I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll talk about that. We talked about that concept, uh, being dubbed like the conscious home. So I think being able to like uh, monitor your usage, anticipate your needs, kind of what you said, like just do things that make sense based on your normal usage patterns and you know, what's going on in the world around you. Um, you know, I think that that makes sense or asking questions when things change. You know, I use ecobee thermostats and living in Chicago, you know, I love the, the mode where it can kind of alternate between heat and cool. We've had to use that a lot lately when we have days that are, you know, in the 70s and then you know, drop below freezing in the same day. Um, but like, you know, wouldn't it be great if you know when all of a sudden all the temperatures are going to be below 50, they say, hey, you know, we should probably go to heat mode now. Probably. It could just do it or it could just ask like, hey, do you want to do this? Like I looked at the weather for the next 30 days, this is what it looks like. M so instead of going to that, you know, current command and control, which is, you know, me having to flub back and forth between this five times and then, you know, finally say, oh yeah, I should probably switch it to heat now. Which is what I did this morning.

Speaker A: And really the AI that we're seeing now, generative AI is kind of Ideal for that because it's designed to examine data, look for patterns and make decisions or not make decisions. But, um, you know, come up with the next thing based on what it knows is the most likely candidate for that. And so, um, I honestly feel like that is the holy grail is solving, is removing that fiddliness to get the home to respond to you the way that you want it to. And that's more than just your daily routine. It's considering the exceptions that might otherwise drive the family nuts. Because that's, you know, that's not what we wanted it to do right now. Why didn't it know that? Well, because it expects that at 11 o' clock every night the light should go out.

Speaker C: Yeah, every. We always write Automations as if we do the same thing every day, but if you really look at it, we never do the same thing. Sometimes you're a bit late or uh, anything can happen. Right. So we're not really that much creatures of habit as we think we are. And I can definitely be that more flexible, um, automation engine for sure.

Speaker A: For sure. Well, while we're talking about AI, that's a look into the future. What uh, else are you looking at ahead? You teased us early on about some new stuff that might be coming out soon. Can you give us some ideas of what's ahead for Home Assistant?

Speaker C: Yeah. So for Home Assistant, um, I mean we have longer term, we're like, we're having a deep dive into revamping our automation engine just to make the UI better, easier to look at, to work with for everyone. But on the very short term we're going to launch our own voice assistant hardware which was for us, um, if you looked at Google, Apple, Amazon, people that would outgrow those ecosystems to get into Home Assistant. We did everything better in my opinion than dashboards, history, automations, but we had no answer to voice at all. Right. So two years ago we started building and now we're one month away from actually launching our own voice assistant. And you can also have that one interact with an AI if you want, so you can hook it into ChatGPT or Google Gemini. You can have it also just run fully local if you want. So there are many different options of running this voice assistant and I think it's going to be, I'm mainly stoked about it. Not because this is going to be the Google Killer, because we're not there yet, but because it gives the hardware to allow our community to build the full Google Killer, uh, in the long term. So this is just Like a milestone for our voice efforts. Um, the other thing that we're building is a Z, uh, wave antenna. So we're building a huge Z wave antenna that can make the best out of Z wave long range, which is the new addition that's been added to Z Wave to make even further, uh, send even signals even further than before. And also of course the classic Z wave mesh works uh, really well. And so those are the two hardware products that I'm super excited about. But I think the cool thing is just the software side that can iterate a lot faster. Right. So once we have great Z wave antennas and great voice hardware, then we can start really moving faster on um, Z Wave cool stuff and voice cool stuff because we have a solid foundation that users can put in their homes.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Well, is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners or folks who might be thinking about Home Assistant but aren't there yet? Before we move on,

Speaker C: I would just say try it out. Like it's very easy to put it next to your existing smart home system. And like I said before, homekit Bridge or with the Google Assistant or Amazon integration, you can get it into your existing smart home. So you know, if you have other people living in your house, they might not even notice that there's something different. But you have access to so many more devices. Especially like the Apple ecosystem tends to have very expensive devices that are like made for Apple Home. You can access a lot of affordable devices that work just as well and have them through a home assistant be routed into those ecosystems. So definitely don't think it's a big migration. You can do it like piecemeal. Or maybe it just monitors your energy and maybe that's just it. Or maybe it reminds you to put the trash outside. Right. That's uh, small things it can help with.

Speaker A: Nice. So if someone does want to get started, where would they go?

Speaker C: If I mean assuming the listeners are mainly United States. Um, I would just say Amazon. Right. There's ah, the Home Assistant Green is on Amazon. Um, but if you go to our website we have virtual machines, Docker containers. Um, if you have a Raspberry PI, we have the Raspberry PI installer, includes the Home Assistant image. Um, there's a lot of different options. But I would say if you are, if you didn't know any of those words. Right, just get the Home Assistant green. That's the, the way to go.

Speaker B: All right, very good. Yeah, we'll definitely make sure we provide all those links to uh, to our listeners and so they can check it out. I. I think I'm, you know, as we said in the beginning, I think I'm convinced. I'll. I'll get a green and. And start playing around a little bit, so.

Speaker C: Nice.

Speaker B: Sold one.

Speaker C: Good.

Speaker B: It's a good start. We'll see if we can get Richard along too.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's one more thing. Yeah, just one more thing.

Speaker C: One, um, more thing. Yeah, I get it. Just, you know, you talk about one more things. There's, like, we have our ecosystem of, like, custom firmware that I talked before. Right. And there's been this whole drama in the United States about, like, my cube blocking, like, garage doors. There's a community member of us started a device called Rage against the Garage Door Opening. Yes. And it runs our firmware, ESP Home. Into it speaks the, uh, the Chamberlain, uh, security protocol. You plug it into your garage, uh, door opener. You get a full local connection with home Assistant, including the motion sensor, light control, like, more things than you could actually do through the app. And it's all local, and it will forever be stable, free, and just, you know, yours. So.

Speaker A: Nice. Good stuff. Another. Another lure. All right, well, Adam, for the first time in a while, we have a listener. Not a question so much as, uh, some feedback.

Speaker B: All right, so, uh, yeah, so Justin said on the most recent episode, speaking about my cabling, we were talking about, uh, upgrading my WI fi to, uh, to the latest standard. And I only have Cat 5e. So, uh, he brought to my attention that Cat 5e and Cat 6 were, uh, reclassified to be able to handle 2.5 gigabit. Uh, you know, so it, uh, sounds like I might be able to make. Make something work. And, uh, and then he also agreed with our friend TJ that it's time for me to put on my big boy pants and get Unifi. So I'll give the teaser that in a, uh, ADHD moment. I did, uh, upload all my blueprints to Unifi's tool the other day and kind of spec'd out what I would need. So I'll definitely do it at some point. I do have the cable modem already there. Uh, I just don't have the WI fi to get everything else everywhere else in the house. So, uh, we'll get there. Um, m. It's definitely in my plans for the next year. Um, now that I am paying for, you know, I don't think it really cost me anything different, but I'm paying for 2 gigabit Internet now. I just need to get my infrastructure where I can actually use it.

Speaker A: All right, Adam, so next time we do a what's going on in our homes episode, we're going to hold you to that.

Speaker B: We'll see. All right, so if you have a smart home question, you can send it our way on social media using the hashtag asksmarthomeshow. Or, uh, you can email that to us as well and we'll pick a question to include in each show and always appreciate the feedback from listeners.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you much. All right, so, uh, that has been a really good show. Thank you so much for joining us. Palace. This has been very informative. I'm again intrigued. So we'll see what happens. I'll let you know if I end up diving in. Uh, but it's definitely very, very interesting and I'm glad we could share all this information with our listeners. Uh, as a follow up, we mentioned your website. Uh, where can people find your website and any other information that's going on about your company?

Speaker C: Well, foundation. Um, so homeassistant. Uh, I.O. is the best place to keep up to date of Home Assistant. All the releases we do every month, the release. So there's. Every month there will be new features added, new cool things you can do with your dashboards and this kind of stuff. So that's the best place to watch. There's of course a YouTube channel. We also do have like a, we call it the release Party. But like for two hours the developers behind Home Assistant talk, uh, about all the new features they've built, why they've built, what we're kind of going towards. And it's uh, if you're really like, want to nerd out on Smart Home, that that's a good place to start.

Speaker A: Nice. And we didn't really talk about this much, but, uh, you're constantly putting updates out. I know it's a running joke on home tech that every month or so they're running a live update while they're doing the show. So it's very, very good to see that sort of, uh, engagement and continued support from your team. All right, well, um, Adam, how about you? Where people are going to find you?

Speaker B: Uh, you can find everything my company's up to@gridconnect.com and you can find me on social media, uh, Atom Justice. I'm like the lone person still on X and on some other things as well, but. Or just search for me. Right.

Speaker A: And you can find Richard. Yeah, you can find me at the Digital Media zone. That's thedigitalmedizone.com and I am on Mastodon and I am the only Richard Guenther on Mastodon these days. So uh, I'm happy about that. Easy to find me. The Smart Home show is part of Technology FM M, which is a, uh, collection of great podcasts that includes the Home Tech Podcast, the Spoon Podcast, and there are multiple Spoon podcasts now. So we'll need to update that and my other show Home On. And of course smarthome FM is where you can find us and all of our show notes and details about our episodes and send us feedback@feedbackmarthomefm. You can find our show in Apple Podcasts Overcast everywhere that you go to listen to podcasts, of course. Do us a favor. If you like the show, it's great. If you want to rate it and review it, we love that. Makes us feel good. The real important thing is tell a friend and subscribe. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening.