Why Home Assistant is the FUTURE of Smart Homes

so you saw the title of this video and you might think that's a little bit controversial because a lot of people don't even know how to use home assistant but as you can see I'm not at my house I'm at the Phoenix Airport and I'm on my way to talk to the king of Home assistant he literally created it his name is paulus and what I've heard from him so far I'm convinced that home assistant is the future [Music] all right I made it here to Austin Texas I'm here for the zwave summit which me paulus and a few others are going to be on a speaking panel and I'll talk more about that in a [Music] second so as a lot of you probably know I've been using home assistant for the last 3 years and I absolutely love it so I'm excited to talk to Paula about some of the features that are coming in the future that I can get excited about as well as you know some of you who have been hesitant to jump on home assistant or maybe have tried it and kind of feel like it's a little too difficult so what they're doing to address it right now and in the future welcome everybody live from the zwave alliance member meeting my name is Paul Scout founder of Home assistant no okay sorry this is paulus he created home assistant over 10 years years ago right it is 10 and a half years ago now well first how long did it actually take you to write it or before you actually published it I mean oh I think it's been like a month or two before I think I actually published it like it was just on and off you know it was very hacky and it wasn't really it wasn't really meant as a platform oh hey what's up it's Reed from the future I'm going to be jumping in throughout this interview to share my opinion and help explain things and it is crazy to hear how home assistant started off as a tiny little side project to what it is now now because of the company that makes home assist Hardware it runs home assistant Cloud we have 33 people working on it they work full-time on home assistant but also ESP home we work on voice projects like pip protect your speech we have the people working on matter all that stuff it makes sense why home assistant can do so much they have a lot of really smart people working on it full-time as well as a massive open-source Community contributing as well but you can't have a system reach Mass adoption on just a lot of features it has to be easy to use as well so they've been hiring the people that are joining I'm super excited about uh one is a ux researcher so she has currently doing her teases on like secondary users in the smart home so you know the uses of our users which really lines up with like the road map work right like we just announced like the road map in the state of the open home we're going to really focus on the home approval Factor so we want to have home approved dashboard allowing people to create dashboards not just for themselves but for their Partners or other people visiting the house home approved automations like how can we create automations that you know work for everyone it's not just like one person that likes it the other person is always annoyed boosting spouse approval factor I love to see it home assistant has gotten much easier to use recently I don't know if you've seen some of the updates like the drag and drop dashboard it's so much easier to use and save so much time like anyone can create a customized dashboard now you don't have to be technical not only that but automations are about to get easier too when people automate it's like we give them a blank slate and we're like go think of something you want to automate but actually as a user you we they often want us to just tell them make suggestions and so if you think about it you have a garage door the ODS that you want to notification when you leave it open are very high we should just be able to suggest that same for leaks like why would you have to set up your own battery alerts your own leak alerts like that kind of stuff should just work I love this and the reason I started my smart home Journey seven years ago with smart things is for how straightforward it is so if home assistant gets a lot of the same features it's going to be difficult to recommend anything besides it especially when you hear what paulus wants to do with dashboards in the future we want people that create cool dashboards actually be able to share it if you look at today we you know you go to Reddit right it's full of amazing dashboards people post the coolest stuff but then people are like how do I get this and it's like well you got to install hacks download this custom card like like addit this y all this this that that it's too difficult people are lost this would be so helpful and I recently tour Dan Dixon's house who has an extremely good good dashboard and I did a video on it recently and if you haven't seen it you should definitely go check it out but a lot of people were asking Dan to share his dashboard because they wanted to implement a lot of the features so this idea of dashboard blueprints is awesome because people could share their dashboard and you won't have to be a programmer to have all these cool features plus it could help Inspire us to think of new ideas that maybe we hadn't thought of before I think for blueprints like I would love for example there to be a barbecue dashboard a plant dashboard like oh maybe you're you know you're really into plants you're growing stuff well that is something that you want to have Monitor and like how much when you need to water when is you last water did it rain can we skip the sprinkling all these kind of bring everything in a single package and allow people to create and then share that I think that would be awesome now Switching gears I know the AI has talked about way too much but what home assistant is doing is way different you have to see this we have big plans for AI not because we have Solutions but because we want to have we have the local data what we are thinking is that if you can run your AI local then you don't have to think about the cost of sending it to open AI because you know you run it local so the cost it's almost free except for electricity and so what we're actually building right now is an experimentation platform so you might be thinking okay AI running locally in my house sounds great but I have home assistant running on a Raspberry Pi how is that going to handle local AI Nvidia reached out to us and they're like you know you guys have a local smart home data the team that actually reach out to us they used home assistant of course so they they knew the platform very well and they're like well listen we make Jetson and Via Jetson which is a platform to run locally large language models what if we make that compatible with home assistant and so they've actually been working it's called the Jetson AI research lab they meet every two weeks they've been improving the AI models that run on Jetson to make them compatible with home assistance you know we implemented AMA for the local large language model API and they now got AMA also running on the Jetson such that it can be used with home assistance so they're putting a lot of effort in making home assistant be able to consume whatever is running on the Jets this is extremely exciting to think about and home assistant stores so much data like every time a device is turned on or off it writes it to the database and it knows if it was done manually or from an automation so AI can look through all that data and figure out our habits suggest automations that we don't have yet write those automations I mean the possibilities are endless and we could get so much more out of the devices we have because it can think of things that we never thought of before so it's super exciting to think about but there is a catch the only downside I have to say about this Nvidia Jetson thing is that the the new Orin board it starts at $600 and it goes all the way up to $2,000 now if you talk to the team they're like well yeah I mean it's expensive gpus and they think that just like you have Network area storage like a Nas in your house you might have just an AI box in your house that can facilitate not just home system but maybe you will have other applications in the future that all can leverage the same AI box this is a fun scenario to think about and I'm curious to hear if you'd want some kind of AI box in your own home let me know down in the comments personally I would want a local AI box running everything in my own house because it's not just about the cost to give an AI system full access to your smart home full access to control your smart home full access to the history you want to be able to know where this data goes right and so with home assistant it's all private it's all local so you can feel comfortable if you run a local large language model you know where the data is going to you know who will have access to it it doesn't end up in some history of your chat log with chat GPT and who knows if they're going to trade on top of that again yikes I don't want AI being trained on the data in my own home for other people's home and this is coming from someone who uploads videos of their own smart home to the Internet so that should tell you something so I mentioned earlier in the video that I was on a speaking panel with paulus and a few others and we were talking about Ai and we had some really good discussions I don't think AI is going to be used in our smart home to make realtime decisions there's too many issues with hallucinations and AI just going haywire and doing crazy things in our home I think AI will be used to help us set up things in our smart home and then we make the decision so it's not as scary well at least that's what I hope for anyways but paulus wasn't there just to talk about AI yeah so we're actually here in Austin at the zwave member Alliance and what the reason we're here as home assistant as nabuk Kasa is because zwave is not that right like there's a lot of hype about matter everybody's like matter this matter that but to be honest there's two fully working standards today zigby and zwave now with home assistant or with nabas I have to say last year or has it been two years ago already we introduced the homeis sky connect and recently at the state of the home we've rebranded this now it's called The homeis Connect zbt 1 and homeis connect is going to be our line of connectivity sticks to make homeis talk to other protocols and the next stick that we are working on is actually a Z-Wave stick so one of the cool things at this Summit is that all the manufacturers are here and they're all bringing their end devices their latest prototypes the latest chips and we're doing range tests so we went to the river here in Austin and we were trying to like okay we have a zwave classic and zwave long range which is the new Z-Wave standard that is also coming to home assistant soon and we actually got to 0.7 miles which is like 1.13 kilm and that's only using zwave classic now that is just line of sight that they were testing but after this interview they were testing on multiple floors of the hotel and they were showing me some of the results and they seem pretty good so very cool all right going back to the title of this video I think home assistant is the future for how fast they're improving they have big updates coming out every single month and no other smart home system even comes close and at the rate that they're improving I think that they're going to be the best system with the most features and the easiest to use Plus on top of all that everything is private and local which is very important to people and so for that reason I think home assistant is the future and I had so much fun at The zwave Summit I learned a lot about zwave long range which I'll be covering more on the channel soon so keep an ey for that and thanks for watching you think that home assistant potentially down the road paired with AI could block Justin Bieber from playing in my house you think that's possible I actually I saw someone in the community of doing this right he would like play uh serious exam on a Sonos and every artist every song change he would send the artist to A large language model say is this country answer only yes or no and then in his automation if the answer was yes skip song so it's already possible today and yeah all right so Justin Bieber is going to be banned a

Channel: Smart Home Solver

Views: 163,849

Keywords: home assistant, home assistant tutorial, home assistant future, home assistant overview, home assistant 2024, home assistant vs homekit, z-wave, z-wave summit, Paulus Schoutsen, smart home solver, smart home, home automation

Id: hMlkzt-2qgk

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024