Hey! Welcome back to the channel.
Today, we’re diving into some seriously exciting updates from Home Assistant version 2025.7, including the brand-new “Ask Question” feature for Assist, a complete redesign of the Area card, an improved area dashboard overview, and a massive upgrade to how integrations work under the hood. And that is not all!
Let’s get into it!
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The new July release of Home Assistant 2025.7 will be available on the first Wednesday of July, and I will quickly show you the latest features. This review is based on the beta version, but most of the time, the final release contains the same functionalities.
Assist Gets Conversational
Home Assistant’s voice assistant—Assist—just got a whole lot smarter.
Until now, Assist (without using LLMs) mostly worked like a one-shot deal. You say a command, it responds, and that’s it. But with this update, Assist can now ask follow-up questions, making your automations more conversational and dynamic.
It’s called the Ask Question action, and you can build full custom conversations right inside your automations. See this example.
So, you can ask Assist to play some music and, based on your answer, it can play a genre, a specific artist, a track, or a playlist on your speakers.
This opens up a whole new level of interaction—all running locally, with custom phrases and fast speech recognition using Home Assistant’s Speech-to-Phrase engine. The demo I showed you utilizes Home Assistant Cloud, by the way.
New Area Card & Dashboard
Next up: the Area card has been completely redesigned, and it looks fantastic.
The new design now blends perfectly with the modern Sections layout. You can choose between a compact mode, which displays only the icon and name, or a detailed view that includes camera feeds, lights, fans, and other controls.
Even better, you can fully customize the controls you want to display and rearrange them as needed. That’s a big win for dashboard fans.
Be aware that if you’re already using Area cards, you’ll need to reconfigure them to match the new design.
Oh, and it now supports cover entities, like blinds and garage doors.
Better Areas Dashboard
You may recall the Experimental Areas dashboard from the April release. Now that the Area Card is updated, the Areas dashboard can also utilize it.
This update brings a clean, uncluttered overview that makes it super easy to control all your rooms at a glance. It also serves as a navigation hub, allowing you to jump into detailed views for each area.
If you’ve got a lot of devices in every room, this update makes it easier to manage all your devices. Setting it up just takes 2 minutes or so.
Integration Sub-Entries
Ever get annoyed having to re-enter the same credentials over and over for similar integrations?
This update addresses the issue by integrating sub-entries.
Now, you can set up a single main integration with your credentials—like your OpenAI or Google account—and then create sub-entries for different bots, calendars, or devices. All those sub-entries will share the same login, but each one performs a unique function.
It’s cleaner, more secure, and way easier to manage.
Integrations like OpenAI, Google Generative AI, Anthropic, MQTT, Telegram Bot, and more now support this feature.
Integration Page Redesign
Speaking of integrations, the Integrations page just got a complete overhaul.
You now see not only your main entries but also the sub-entries, as well as which devices and services are associated with each one.
This makes it much easier to understand how everything connects in your setup. No more digging around to figure out which sensor belongs to what.
It’s a smart visual upgrade that makes system management more intuitive, especially for bigger setups.
Integrations
As with every release, this release introduces new integrations and updates to existing ones. You can find them in this list. Next to that, there are other noteworthy changes that you can also find in this list. I’ll include the link in the video description.
Also, be sure to read about the backward-incompatible changes to avoid any disappointments when you install this version.
Do you have questions or would you like a more in-depth look at any of these features? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear how you’re using them in your setup. Don’t forget to give this video a thumbs-up and subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. This helps me a lot. You can also sponsor me on Patreon, Ko-Fi, or by becoming a paid member of my channel.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll catch you in the next one!
Bye Bye!
