r/homeassistant • u/frenck_nl Home Assistant Lead @ OHF • 18d ago

Release 2025.8: The summer of AI ☀️

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/08/06/release-20258/
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u/trialbaloon 18d ago

Not sure why AI is needed for most home automation. I guess I can see the appeal of converting english phrases to automation yaml but in terms of turning off my lights... I just need an algorithm that can determine sunset and a function call.

I honestly dont know how LLMs fit into automation. If you make heavy use of voice assistants maybe? I never found those useful though.

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u/kmccoy 18d ago

Why is any of this needed? Can't you just turn on and off the light switch on your own?

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u/trialbaloon 18d ago

Sure. But it saves a small amount of time. Arguably that's not needed in terms of life but this subreddit is about home automation so I guess I'll just assume that most here are interested in the topic. The question I am posing is what use LLMs have to the subject of this subreddit.

I guess my use of home automation is all quite practical. Lights are easy enough to automate and things like irrigation/home security. I'm not trying to recreate some Hollywood notion of what the future looks like, I'm doing things that save me time.

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u/kmccoy 18d ago

That's all totally fair, and honestly I'm way more of an AI skeptic than I am an AI embracer. But I've experimented with a few things that I think are interesting in terms of how it can improve the little things that Home Assistant does. One is to look at a camera feed and see if the trash can is by the house or out by the road. Another is to summarize weather alerts for announcements, and to summarize the weather forecast for the upcoming few days for a markdown card. I can see some use cases for improving the use of voice commands to set timers, which we currently do on Alexa (and is basically the only thing do with voice control in our home) and would like to move to HA when they feel like they're as functional in HA as in Alexa. All of the stuff we do is practical and aimed at saving a bit of time or hassle to do a thing. The great thing about how the HA devs are incorporating this stuff is that it allows people who are completely anti-AI to ignore it, the people who are completely all-in on a Star Trek voice command future can use all the tools, and the folks like you and me who are in the middle are provided with tools that enable us to make small improvements in our setup as we see fit.

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u/trialbaloon 18d ago

Yeah I wouldn't say I am a hater of what HomeAssistant is doing and think ultimately users absolutely can decide if they want to fully embrace AI into their home. I think that's your right. I do find the concept of using some local LLMs potentially interesting. I would never use a cloud based one but that holds true for virtually all of my home automation (no cloud).

I think I dont always agree with how HomeAssistant does development. I find their priorities to not really align with mine most of the time. However, they are, at least for now, very ethical. They give the user power and even provide an API letting you use HomeAssistant as a meta API ignoring all of their features if you want. I love that and wish more developers gave users that sort of power.

I think your examples are pretty appropriate uses of LLMs. I think people like me dont necessarily think LLMs are useless, just extremely tired of the hype. I also work as a software engineer so I've become a bit radicalized just based on how often I have to listen to some C suite dipshit talk about AI.