Home Assistant is rolling out another exciting update. The new 2025.8 release has improvements to group management, AI automation, and other helpful changes.
First, you’re no longer stuck with just controlling a whole group at once of devices at once. You can now make small tweaks to a single member without having to go hunting for its individual entity. This is a huge time saver, especially for larger groups that need multiple fixes.
The time trigger for automations now includes the ability to specify weekdays. This is great if you have an automation that you only want to run at a specific time on weekends or during the week. Also, a long-awaited feature is the new energy flow visualization for the energy dashboard. It’s a Sankey Chart that shows you exactly where your energy is coming from and where it’s going. It’s a really helpful way to see how your home is using power.
On top of that, this release has been dubbed “The summer of AI.” The app is laying down a foundation for a lot of new AI features. This includes things like AI Tasks, which basically let you delegate tasks to AI and get a structured result back. This is a huge step forward for anyone who wants to integrate AI into their smart home workflow. There is also a new integration, OpenRouter, which gives you access to over 400 additional large language models.
You can do something like attach files or a camera feed, and ask the AI to analyze what it sees. A perfect example of this is the user setting up a template entity that updates every five minutes. The AI Task is to analyze the camera feed of a chicken coop and count the number of birds inside. The AI returns that count as a number, and you can then use that number in your automations or as a simple sensor.
While Home Assistant has already introducednew installation methodsand integration sub-entries, the company has built on the latter with AI Tasks and “Suggest with AI” buttons. The “Suggest with AI” button is a new feature that will appear in places like the save dialog for automations and scripts. When you enable AI suggestions in your settings, this button can help you come up with a name, description, category, and label for your automation.
Finally, if you use Home Assistant Voice to talk to an AI, you won’t have to wait a while for a response. The system can now start generating the audio response before the AI has finished generating the entire answer. This is especially great for users with local AI, which can sometimes be a bit slow, or when you have long announcements playing on your speakers.
Luckily, Home Assistant seems to understand that not everyone wants AI in their home. So these new features won’t appear unless you specifically set up an AI integration. The update is available now for Home Assistant servers, and you can checkthe official websitefor instructions on new installs.
