10 Best Features This Year - Home Assistant Rewind 2022

home assistant has had another exceptional year this year going from strength to strength and making big strides in making home assistant better than ever before this year in 2022 home assistant set itself an overarching goal and mission for the year ahead which was called a streamlining user experiences essentially the mission this year was that with every new release the team wanted to improve and make things easier for new users to be able to dive in and start automating with home assistant so with that in mind I wanted to take a look back at some of the big new features and advancements that were made this year in the name of streamlining experiences as we rewind home assistant for 2022. it that way this way this way the first feature I wanted to start off with coming in at number 10 is an absolute classic demonstration of improving the user experience and that is the groups feature that came out in the April update this feature allows you to group devices together making it easier to control lots of devices altogether as if they were one single unit so if you have a whole bunch of Lights you want to turn on together and change the color on then groups would allow you to do that easily now that's a pretty nice and essential feature and all but does that really count as improving the user experience absolutely you see groups itself has actually been around for years and years at this point but you could only create a group by diving into configuration files and manually creating groups in yaml but the April update made groups available with a couple of clicks inside of the UI drastically improving how easy it is for new users who may otherwise be daunted and rightly so by yaml files number nine is another feature that was also intended to help new users by helping them figure out what is going on with their install and it's a feature that came out in 2022.8 called repairs have you ever been playing a game and gotten really stuck and you're not sure what to do next when a little hint pops up and nudges you in the right direction well that's pretty much what repairs does repairs will pop up in the settings menu and give you warnings about things that are potentially wrong or misconfigured with your system and not only will it tell you that something is wrong it also tells you what you need to do to fix it this is a really useful way of keeping an eye on the overall health of your home assistant to make sure it's running the best it can allowing you to keep on automating number eight is a feature that I'd be willing to bet not many of you think about and doesn't really seem that important but should you ever need it you will be so glad it exists the zigbee backup feature from the September release this feature makes it possible able to do a backup of your zigbee network right from inside of Home assistant with the click of a button this is really useful for a few reasons firstly one of zigbee's downside is that you can only have one coordinator in a network so if it dies and you need to replace it that backup file is going to be critical for saving you from running around and manually repairing 20 50 100 150 devices all at once we'll also let you seamlessly migrate from one coordinator to another if you want to switch out your original one for a better performance one for example and finally it can also help you migrate between different zigbee software such as going from zigbee to mqtt to Zha if you want to test both out and see which one is right for you before committing coming in at number seven is an automation specific feature that made its debut in May and was a much requested feature from users of the ha community and that was the if then action if then is something that you've probably heard of before at some point even if you aren't a developer and if that allows you to have different actions happen in an automation depending on what's happened first so for example if the light level in the kitchen is higher than 20 Lux turn the light off else turn the light on it allows you to condense multiple actions into one automation by making smart decisions rather than having to create a separate individual automation for each action now this was already possible for quite some time thanks to the choose action however many people were a little overwhelmed by all the different choices and options when using the choose action so if then was introduced as a much simpler and much more user-friendly way of achieving a similar result with the choose action being reserved for more complex situations the if then is a really great addition to automations that beginners will be more familiar with 6 is another automation feature that was introduced to drastically reduce the barrier for beginners to use actually not even just beginners I'm pretty confident that the vast majority of people far prefer this feature over the previous way of doing things and this was the play media action in automations playing media in home assistant is an essential thing to do whether that's to play music on speakers text-to-speech announcements or even load up your favorite movie on your TV but before this feature was added back at the start of the year it was extremely convoluted and tedious to do where you had to manually enter the path to files figure out which folder to store stuff in and which service to use and so on but as of 2022.3 the media selector feature was born which added new UI elements to allow you to go in and with a few clicks you could select exactly what you wanted to do which devices you wanted to play on and what the source was simple it it's one of those things that seems like such an obvious thing now but wasn't always possible getting into our top five features now again was a hugely requested feature which was once again added in the September release the scheduler as the name suggests this helper allows you to create schedules for things that happen on a frequent basis for things like heating schedules light schedules for when you're away on holiday bin day reminders and so on this really neat helper allows you to Define days and times that you want to automate on even allowing you to create multiple times for a single day once you have your schedule created you can then very easily create your own scheduled automations this was once again possible before if you had the patience to sit and create multiple triggers or multiple automations for each time of the day but this again streamlines the user experience by making it just a couple of clicks to achieve the same result nice the next feature is probably the most simplest feature on this list but one that I've seen tons of positive feedback on enough for it to achieve number four the sub view feature added in October this feature is specifically for your dashboards and allows you to add a page that you can navigate to through another page so for example if you have a dashboard that groups devices and organizes them by the room that they are located in you can have navigation on your dashboard that when you click on the room it takes you into the view for that room where all of your devices are located and then also includes a back button to take you back to the previous page the sub view also doesn't show up in the top bar meaning that you aren't wasting precious mobile Space by having to show that top navigation bar again a really simple feature but one that is very appreciated number three was one that snuck in in the final release of the year and again was extremely well received the local calendar feature yep that's right home assistant now has its very own inbuilt and fully featured local calendar previously we were required to use a third-party Cloud integration for calendars such as Google Calendar but now home assistant has that functionality built right in this allows you to create automations based on upcoming events things like bin day reminders setting a do not disturb mode for when you're in a work meeting or maybe even holiday modes can all be done locally with the calendar it even has support for repeating events as well as automatic end times this is undoubtedly one of my favorite features of 2022 coming into clinch the second place spot is something that isn't actually so much of a feature but I do think it made a huge impact into the overall mission of streamlining experiences and this was the automation editor redesign which happened once again in September the problem with the previous automation editor was that it was totally fine when you had one trigger and one action but as soon as you started to go over that it got very unwieldy and cluttered very quickly and would result in scrolling all over the place to try and locate where you had added that one thing the new automation editor brought in a bunch of improvements such as collapsible sections auto-generated explanations of the sections with the ability to rename and state and attribute Auto completion the result of this was a much cleaner manageable and nicer UI which made it faster and more intuitive to automate especially when on a mobile device this is a change I can't even imagine reverting back to what was previously available after using it and the feedback I saw from the community was overwhelmingly positive towards this change definitely a worthy runner-up when it comes to streamlining experiences at the top of our list is one I'm sure many of you guessed and it is of course the Bluetooth features and improvements the Bluetooth proxy feature was first added in September once again a man that was a huge release but has had a few updates since then but I also wanted to include just the general improvements to Bluetooth as a whole in this too out of the four main Protocols of zigbee Z-Wave Wi-Fi and ethernet and Bluetooth Bluetooth was without a doubt the worst performing on home assistant in the past but much of this year was dedicated to fixing and improving the bluetooth support and has really come on Leaps and Bounds since the start of this year Bluetooth proxy was a huge part of that effort too and basically this feature allows you to make your own wireless Bluetooth adapters using ESP home placing them around your house and allowing you to connect and bring in even more Bluetooth devices directly into home assistant even devices that were out of range of your home assistant server meaning you can integrate with even more devices than before particularly those in challenging locations this is a really amazing feature from this year along with the mammoth effort made in improving bluetooth support as a whole and why it makes it to the top of my list and I've got a feeling that we haven't seen the last of the Bluetooth improvements just yet those are my top 10 features from this year but there were so many good ones to pick from that didn't quite make it in so I'm really curious to hear what your favorite features were from this year and why make sure to drop them in the comment section Down Below in the next video I'm going to be looking forward and making some predictions for what I'd like to see in 2023 now that we have the new goal which is of course year of the voice which I am really looking forward to so make sure to check that video out other than that I hope you enjoyed this video please make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed if you haven't already and I will see you in next video and most likely in the next year have a good one bye

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 39,934

Keywords: home assistant, home assistant rewind 2022, home assistant features, home assistant 2022, smart home, home assistant setup, home assistant new features, home assistant new features 2022

Id: cCH4IPtdA38

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022