Hi! It’s almost August 2023 and Home Assistant 2023.8 will be released on the first Wednesday of the month. This version has some very interesting new things like adding items to your shopping list using assist, wildcard support for sentence triggers, and the possibility to generate an image using OpenAI DALL-E. Let’s dive into it!
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Introduction of Home Assistant 2023.8
Another month has passed and the new version 2023.8 will be released this upcoming Wednesday. This release has some very interesting new features. It seems that this is not a very big release, but the functionalities that have been added are awesome. Be aware that this video is based on the beta version of 2023.8, so it might be that some functionalities will not make the final release.
Translated services
All the services in Home Assistant are now translatable. The UI within automations could already be viewed in your own language, but the services were still in English. These are now translated as well.
Introducing the event entity
Working with events is not the easiest thing to do. Sometimes you needed to do that to catch a click on a button for instance. If you wanted to work with an event trigger in automations you had to find out what the event name was and what data is being sent with it. Now, the event entity type is introduced in this release. This means that integrations can now provide you with an event entity and it will show up in the UI, can directly be used in the automations editor, and provides historical information in the logbook. This is already implemented by Matter, Hue, MQTT, and Homekit Devices. So now you can easily catch a short press of a button and trace it in the logbook for example.
Improving the first experience with Home Assistant 2023.8
The next thing is probably something that you will never see if you already have Home Assistant running. But, when you install Home Assistant for the first time, you can now search for your address to determine your Home zone. So, you don’t have to zoom in on the map anymore to determine your location.
Add items to your shopping list with Assist
If you use the shopping list integration of Home Assistant, you can now add items to the shopping list using Assist. So you can now add items using your voice!
Wildcard support for sentence triggers
The next one is a big one! You can now use wildcards in sentence triggers. This means that you can create flexible automations that support using a wildcard. This wildcard can then be used as a variable in the action of the automation. For example, I created an automation that handles a light of your choice in your house and turns them into the color that you want.
In the trigger section I created a sentence trigger with the following sentence: turn on {light_entity} in {light_color}. So, I defined the variables light_entity and light_color in this sentence.
In the actions section, I created one call service action with the service light.turn_on. Then, I use the variables that I created in the trigger to turn on the specific light in the color of my choice.
If I open Assist, and enter this sentence, you will see that the light turns on in the color of my choice. This is just a simple example, but I hope that you can see that these wildcards open up a whole new world for voice assistance in Home Assistant. I think the next step will be that you can actually start creating conversations with Home Assistant by creating multiple automations that respond to your questions and can even ask a question in return, etcetera.
I’d like to send a shoutout to Petro, who explained to me how variables can be used in automations so that I could create this automation. Thanks man!
Generate an image with OpenAI’s DALL-E in Home Assistant 2023.8
But, there’s more in this release. You can now generate an image with OpenAI’s DALL-E. You might wonder for what use cases this might be relevant. Well, imagine that you want to show the current weather conditions on your dashboard and that you want to show a different image when the weather changes. With this new functionality, you can generate a different image every time.
To test this, go to the Developer Tools and click on the Services tab. Now select the service openai_conversation.generate_image, select the OpenAI Conversation integration, and enter a text to create an image. Select the size of the image and click on Call Service. A URL to the image will be generated and you can use this URL in a picture entity card for example.
If you combine this with the wildcard support for sentence triggers, you can even generate images with your voice now!
Be aware that you need a paid subscription to OpenAI. If you want to know how you can set up OpenAI in Home Assistant, then please watch this video where I explain it.
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Condition selector
If you like to create Blueprints, you can now use the new condition selector. This selector shows the condition part of an automation, so you can use user-provided conditions in blueprints now. This makes blueprints way more flexible.
Other noteworthy changes in Home Assistant 2023.8
Next to these major changes, there’s always the list of other noteworthy changes. One of the things that caught my eye is another expansion of the Roborock integration. It now shows an error sensor, volume controls, and Do Not Disturb time settings. You can find the complete list of these changes on this page. The link is in the description below.
New integrations
And of course there are new integrations like Electric Kiwi, Duotecno, Gardena Bluetooth, Opower, and PEGELONLINE. The complete list can be found on this page.
Conclusion
This video is created based on the beta release of Home Assistant 2023.8, so the functionalities in the final release might slightly differ from what’s in the beta. The final release of Home Assistant 2023.8 will be released on the 1st Wednesday of August. Make sure you read the breaking changes to prevent you run into any trouble after you’ve updated to this version.
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