Home Assistant 2023.3 is released and is full of new features. Let’s have a quick look at what is new in this release!
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Home Assistant publishes a new release every 1st Wednesday of the month. That’s a big achievement. Let’s see what is new.
New Restart options
We start with a new interface for restarting Home Assistant. There are various ways to restart or reload Home Assistant and new options are added in the Restart menu in this release. For this, go to Settings->System and click on the new Power icon in the right upper corner. Here you see the following options:
- Quick Reload: This reloads all YAML configurations without restarting Home Assistant. You can also reload the separate YAML configurations in the Developer Tools which I will show you in a minute.
- Restart Home Assistant: This well ehhh, restarts Home Assistant and interrupts all running automations and scripts.
- If you click on Advanced options, you’ll see two other options.
- The first one is Reboot System which reboots the hosts that runs Home Assistant and all Add-ons. I use this sometimes if Zigbee2MQTT is not responding anymore.
- Shutdown System: This shuts down the host system completely.
The same restart options can be found in the Developer Tools under the YAML tab. Here you can reload all the YAML configurations separately and you can click on the RESTART link as well to open the restart dialog box.
Assist can show the current state of things
You can now ask Assist to show the status of entities in your house. There are three types of questions you can ask:
- You can ask for the state of things. For instance: “What is the office temperature?” or “Is the mood light on?”
- You can also ask any or all questions. For instance: “Are all doors closed?” or “Are any lights on in the Office?”
- And you can ask many or which questions? For instance: “How many lights are on in the office” or “Which lights are on?”
Cleaner Entity information dialogs
The entity dialogs have changed, so they look a lot cleaner now. See for instance this office back light enitity. You can control the light immediately here, and the controller interface looks different which I will cover in a minute. You can click on the history icon to view the history. There is a cogwheel now and if you press it, you can change the entity settings. If you click on the three dots, you can jump to the device info and see all the related things like what the related entities are and in what automations it is used.
New Dialogs for lights, switches, and siren entities
I just briefly showed the new dialog for lights. You can now control the light straight from the entity dialog using this new controller. There’s also an option to change the effect and toggle the lights on and off. This also works on your dashboard cards.
The same goes for switches. You can now turn a switch on or off on the entity card itself. And it works for siren entities as well.
Sensor Display Precision
The next thing was already implemented in the previous beta release of Home Assistant, but was pulled from the final release. Now it’s possible to change the precision of a sensor. This is really nice because before we had to create a template to achieve this. This new interface saves a lot of work. Just change the precision of a sensor in the entity settings of that sensor and you’re done. Nice!
New create automation dialog
The automation creation dialog has received an overhaul. You can choose for creating a new automation from scratch or selecting a blueprint that you’ve created or imported. I’m not sure what happens if you have a lot of Blueprints here. I do not use Blueprints myself, but it might be a long list if you use a lot of them. Let me know in the comments what your experience is!
Thread and Matter
The Thread integration now shows up on your devices and service dashboard. You can add an open-thread border router here. Although I do use the Sky Connect, I didn’t enable multiprotocol support on it yet because I experienced some difficulties with it. I will do that later when I will create a tutorial about Matter in the near future.
Matter now supports connecting to Matter bridges, so you can now connect your Hue hub over Matter if you like.
Other changes
There are some more changes in this release. I will just mention some of them briefly.
You can now change energy sensors from Kilowatt to watts or other energy units of measurement in the entity settings. Previously you had to do that by creating a template. So this adds more functionality to the UI and you do not need to use YAML for this anymore.
The statistics have been improved so that they get presented faster now.
The statistics graph card can now hide the legend.
The Switchbot blind tilt is now added to the Switchbot integration. I will publish a video about the Switchbot Blind Tilt around the end of this month, so stay tuned for that.
The Reolink integration now provides entities to update the firmware of the camera. So you can update the awesome Reolink Video Doorbell directly from Home Assistant. You can watch this Reolink Video Doorbell video where I show how you can integrate it into Home Assistant if you didn’t already.
KNX Data Secure support is now added as well.
There’s support for the Shelly Pro #EM energy sensors now.
See the whole list of changes and new integrations in this list. The link is in the description below. And, as always, read the breaking changes in the release notes before you upgrade Home Assistant! You might break things and your family won’t be happy if you do.
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