Home Assistant 2023.3: Dialogs! – Home Assistant

Home Assistant Core 2023.3! 🎉

February was a short month, resulting in a short release cycle, but… That
didn’t stop anybody from stuffing this release with many great improvements!

As the release title most fittingly puts it, most features of this release
show up in dialogs. New dialogs, restyled dialogs, new features that appear
in dialogs, and all sorts of new dialogues you can have with Assist. Something
with “dialogs” all over these release notes!

Besides dialogs, this release brings in three new integrations, updates to
Thread and Matter, and quite an impressive list of other noteworthy changes.

My personal favorite in this release is, undoubtedly, the all-new restart dialog.
It brings in proper choice, less navigation, and it looks slick! I am genuinely
really loving and enjoying the result. 🤩

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube 1 March 2023, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET!

Restarting Home Assistant

Since we started redesigning our menu structure (a little over a year
ago), “Restarting” Home Assistant has been a source of discussion in our
community. Home Assistant can be restarted, reloaded, rebooted,
and powered off; it quickly became unclear what to use and when.

We’ve come up with a solution inspired by the good old Windows XP computer
turn-off screen. @matthiasdebaat made a UX that has been implemented
by @piitaya that will hopefully make this all better, more clear.

Nice, right? 🤩 What is entirely new is the first item shown: “Quick reload”.
Quick reload calls all active integrations in your system that support
reloading YAML configuration on the fly 🚀.

This means all integrations individually listed as reloadable under the YAML
tab in the developer tools are reloaded simultaneously! Also, @frenck made
quick reload available as a service,
so you can automate with it.

Lastly, another place for finding it more easily; the option to restart has
also been added to the three-dotted overflow menu in the top right of the
settings screen.

Asking Assist for the current state of things

This release updates Assist with the capability to ask for the state of things
around your home. For example:

Intents for three types of questions have been added:

• Ask for the state of a single entity:
  • “What is the outside temperature?”
  • “Is the front door locked?”
  • “What is the power consumption in the office?”
• Any or all questions:
  • “Are any lights on in the bedroom?”
  • “Are all windows closed in the kitchen?”
• How many or which questions:
  • “How many lights are on in the office?”
  • “Which doors are open?”

Thanks, @synesthesiam for implementing this, and thanks to language leaders
and contributors for helping out providing translations for all these intents! ❤️

Want to help with adding support for these intents in your language? Please do!
Read more about contributing sentences in our documentation.

Cleaner entity information dialogs

The entity information dialog (also known as the more-info dialog) got some
nice improvements in this release.

The “Info”, “History”, “Settings”, and “Related” tabs have been removed, which
gives the dialog a much cleaner look. Icons for settings and history have been
added in the top right to replace these tabs. The new three-dotted overflow menu
can bring up related entity information and provides a direct link to the device
dashboard of the device that provided this entity.

Nice job @matthiasdebaat and @piitaya!

New dialogs for lights, switches and siren entities

There is more to tell about this release’s more-info dialogs. @matthiasdebaat
and @piitaya have been working on the designs shared
during the State of the Open Home 2022.
This release brings in the first overhauls to the entity dialogs of light,
switch, and siren entities.

The new dialogs are nice and clean. The new sliders and buttons work absolutely
magnificent on both desk and mobile. For the brightness slider, you can drag
it all down without turning the light off, making it possible to dim your
light to even the lowest point.

In case of a light, additional controls for turning on/off, color (temperature),
and effects appear right below the slider. In the top right, you’ll find the new
controls that come with the cleaner look we discussed in the previous paragraph.

Sensor display precision

Got a sensor that has too many decimals in its numeric value? Would you like
to display it rounded to a single or maybe even no decimals?

Just create a template sensor change it directly from the UI!

Thanks @emontnemery for building out this feature!

This has also been extended into integrations, which now can provide
a more precise value while suggesting to, show it with less precision
by default. This allows you to change it if you don’t like the defaults.

You can also take advantage of the configured precision when writing templates,
as the states() function has been extended to help with that.
You can find more information on
formatting sensor states in the templating documentation.

New create automation dialog

Let’s continue the dialogs theme this release! As @piitaya also gave
the dialog you see when you create a new automation, a facelift!

You can now quickly find and pick a Blueprint to use for your automation or
create one from scratch. The overall look and feel is much more modern, and
fits our current design better.

You may notice it now shows author information in this dialog. If you create
Blueprints, you can now add author information to your Blueprint,
which will be shown in this dialog.

Thread & Matter

Behind the scenes, a lot is happening; adding, extending and improving
Thread & Matter support for Home Assistant.

A couple of weeks ago, we published an extensive blog article on where we’re at.
Some of the features mentioned in that blog post will become available today.

The most visual change is that the Thread integration
will now show up on your devices & services dashboard. The “Configure” button
on the Thread card will reveal the all-new Thread panel.

The Thread panel lets you view your Thread network(s) and provides controls
to add an OpenThread border router. More importantly, an option to download
diagnostics has been added in the three-dotted menu in the top right. This will
help with finding, triaging, and fixing issues as the development
on Thread continues.

As for Matter, it now supports connecting to Matter bridges! So, you can
now connect, for example, your Hue hub over Matter!

Two Philips Hue bridges connected using Matter, and it is fast!

Although, if you want to connect your Hue hub, we of course recommend using
the dedicated Hue integration, which will provide a much
more stable and feature rich solution. Nevertheless, having bridge support is
a huge milestone!

Adding a Matter device is now also more logical. Just add a new device
from the Devices & Services page, just like how you would add any other device
or integration to Home Assistant. Oh! Let’s not forget about @ArturoGuerra,
who added support for color lights to Matter! Thanks!

Python 3.11 support

Support for Python 3.11 is here! 🐍

This change is only interesting if you manually run Home Assistant
directly in Python (the Home Assistant Core installation method). If that
is the case, you can now start using Home Assistant with Python 3.11, which
should dramatically improve performance over previous Python versions.

We are also working on upgrading to Python 3.11 for our Home Assistant OS,
Supervised, and Container installation methods so we can provide
the same performance improvements. We’ll keep you posted.

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other
noteworthy changes this release:

• You can now change the unit of measurement for a sensor that provides power readings.
  So, if you like your kW sensor to be displayed as W, that is now possible. Thanks, @emontnemery!
• All contributed translations are now automatically updated with each release!
  This includes patch releases. Thanks, @frenck.
• Faster it is! @bdraco keeps improving the performance, and this release is no exception!
  The statistics should be almost instant now, which is notable on
  the energy dashboard. Lots of MQTT-related performance improvements too!
• The statistic graph card can now hide the legend, nice and clean @piitaya!
• You can now use templates in the for parameter of state conditions. Thanks, @emontnemery!
• Our (opt-in only) Analytics will now include the database engine and version
  you use with your recorder. This helps us making database-related decisions and improvements.
  Thanks, @ludeeus!
• @marcelveldt added support for Smart Scenes (Natural Light) to the Philips Hue integrations. Nice!
• If your ONVIF camera supports it, it will now provide switch entities
  for auto-focus, wiper, and IR lights. Thanks, @partofthething!
• The input select helper first, last, previous, and next services are now also
  available on select entities, thanks @frenck.
• It looks like @jesserockz took a small break from ESPHome to implement support
  for the SwitchBot Blind Tilt to the SwitchBot integration. Thank you!
• The OpenAI Conversation integration now has options to customize it to your liking, thanks @bendews!
• @marcolivierarsenault added support for ecobee ventilator, awesome!
• The Reolink integration now provides entities to update the firmware of your camera, control zoom,
  and control auto-focus. Thanks @starkillerOG!
• KNX Data Secure support is added, and importing your Keyfile to use it is now super easy. Just upload it from your browser
  when configuring it in Home Assistant. Awesome @farmio!
• @thecode added support for Shelly Pro 3EM energy sensors, nice!
• ScreenLogic now supports local push updates for almost all entities. Thanks @dieselrabbit!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing
to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be
at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker,
to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more
places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter
to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and
other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Breaking Changes