Hey, here we are again! Today, I’m thrilled to unveil the exciting features of the Home Assistant November 2023.11 release!This release is packed with new features, so let’s dive into it right away!
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Ed
The new November version 2023.11 of Home Assistant will be released on the first Wednesday of November. At this moment, the bèta is already available, so if you want to see the new features of Home Assistant already, you can try and install the bèta. Please be aware that the functionalities that I show in this video are based on the beta and might slightly differ from the final release this upcoming Wednesday. But boy, I really like this release. There’s so much to show!
To-do Lists
Do you use the Home Assistant Shopping List? This is now replaced by the new TODO entity type. Your existing Shopping list will automatically be converted to a To-do list. Stay on top of your priorities by organizing tasks into different To-do lists. You can create separate lists for work, home, personal tasks, etcetera, keeping everything neatly organized and easy to find. You can sort the ToDo list using Drag and Drop and mark items as Done. Next to that, you can create new Lists to organize tasks in specific categories. There are also a couple of new services available for to-do lists. You can create a to-do list item in your specific list, allowing you to create automations that will fill your to-do list based on certain conditions. You can also delete and update to-do list items using these services.
And the best part? Home Assistant Todo Lists seamlessly syncs across all your devices, so you can access your tasks anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re at home or on the go, staying productive has never been easier. Say goodbye to scattered sticky notes and unfinished tasks. Take control of your to-do’s and experience the power of organization using Home Assistant. At the moment it is not yet fully possible to manage your to-do lists using your voice, but as soon as that is implemented, I don’t need to use my Google Home speakers anymore to fill my Google shopping lists. Great!
Custom state content for Tile cards
It’s now possible to enhance tile cards by adding personalized information based on the state of your devices and entities. The first step is to select a tile card in Home Assistant that you would like to customize. Once you have chosen the card, we can start modifying its content to display relevant information. This is where custom state content comes into play.
When you go to the appearance section, you can choose all the attributes that you want to show below the name of your device. It’s not possible to use templates here, so if you want to use templates to show information, you’ll need to use a mushroom card instead.
Matter 1.2
Version 1.2 of the Matter specification has been launched and this new version has already been implemented into Home Assistant version 2023.11. Make sure to toggle the beta switch in the Matter add-on if you want to test Matter in the beta release of Home Assistant!
Custom date ranges in the energy dashboard!
The Energy Dashboard now allows selecting a custom date range. There’s a new date picker in the interface where you can still select daily, weekly, and yearly overviews. Next to that, you can now select your own date range to show your energy values.
New conditions for the conditional card
Do you ever use a conditional card in Home Assistant? The conditional card is awesome because you can show or hide other cards based on the conditions that you set in the conditional card. This conditional card now has some new conditions that will make your dashboards even more tailor-made.
There are a couple of new conditions added. The first one is the numeric state Condition. The numeric state condition allows you to show or hide cards based on the state of a numeric entity. This is useful if you want to show or hide cards based on a numeric value like temperature, the number of lights that are on in a room, or any other numeric value.
The second condition is the Screen condition. This condition allows you to show cards on certain resolutions only. So, using this condition you can show some cards in the desktop layout, but hide them on a mobile device. This way, you can tailor the mobile layout of your Home Assistant dashboard just the way you want it to be!
The third condition is the User condition. With this condition, you can show or hide cards on your dashboard for specific users only. This is great if you want to hide some cards for your kids or wife and helps improve the Wife Acceptance Factor for Home Assistant!
Restart Home Assistant in safe mode
There’s a new option in the restart interface of Home Assistant. You can now restart in Safe mode. This will disable all custom integrations and custom dashboard resources. This way, you only start Home Assistant Core, which can greatly help debug your installation and find out whether a custom integration is the cause of the problems that you may experience. If you restart Home Assistant one more time, you get out of safe mode again!
Set up Improv devices, directly from Home Assistant!
This is a bit technical, but if you have bought a device that supports Improv Wi-Fi over Bluetooth, and you are using Bluetooth in Home Assistant, you can now set up the device in Home Assistant itself. If it’s an ESPHome device, you do not have to set it up using ESPHome anymore. Home Assistant will discover the device through Bluetooth and will ask you to enter your WiFi credentials straight away!
Configuring script fields for your script in the UI
Within scripts, you can add fields that the user can fill in so that the script can use this filled-in data. For instance, you can let a user fill in a message and the script will send that message to someone’s phone. It’s now possible to configure the fields from the UI, so it makes it easier to add fields to scripts. You can call the script using a service in an automation to trigger the script. The automation then provides the values for the fields in th escript.
Country selector
There’s a new selector in town that you can use in your blueprints or in script fields. This is the country selector and makes it possible to select a country in your Home Assistant Blueprint.
Type-checking in your templates
Wow, it’s now possible to check the type of a variable in a template. This allows us to check if a variable is of type number, string, list, etcetera. Great!
Other noteworthy changes
Next to these major changes, there are a lot of other noteworthy changes as well. You can find them in this list. The link is in the description below the video.
New integrations
And there are, of course, new integrations in this Home Assistant 2023.11 release that you can view in this list. At the moment these are Google Tasks, Improv BLE, Local to-do list, Tami4 Edge / Edge+ , and To-Do list. The Fitbit and Random integration can now be set up from the UI, so you do not need to set them up through the configuration.yaml anymore!
Conclusion
This November release of Home Assistant is truly packed with a lot of new features. As I said before, this video is based on the beta release of Home Assistant, so it might be that some features might look a little bit different in the final 2023.11 version that will be released on the first Wednesday of November. Make sure you read the breaking changes list to prevent unwanted behavior as soon as you update Home Assistant.
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