Beyond Year One: Our Home Assistant Journey
It felt beyond satisfying to finally truck all of our decommissioned "smart" assistants down to the local electronics recycling center (the one that opens only on the most irregular schedule). The Echos and Hubs had long worn out their welcome in our homes. Especially those random, creepy conversations that would start up from a speaker in the middle of the night with no prompting at all. We know some of you know exactly what we're talking about.
They seemed helpful in the early days, but it quickly became clear these gadgets were pulling in the opposite direction from what we wanted. So when we discovered the Home Assistant project, it was worth trying. We had a few spare Raspberry Pi units sitting in the parts bin (back when they were still affordable), pulled one out, flashed a microSD card, and gave it a spin. The setup was straightforward enough that within short order we knew we were on the right path. The only missing piece was voice control. The customizable web interface was already great, but being able to talk to the system would make it even better. Then the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition arrived in late 2024 as the culmination of their "Year of the Voice" efforts, and that changed everything for us.
As we described in our earlier Privacy Tool Spotlight, we tested it with the Nabu Casa cloud solution and suddenly had the missing functionality. A simple verbal command could turn lights on or off, which is perfect when you are nowhere near a switch. Saying "Turn downstairs off" let our laziness win and saved yet another trip down the steps.
Later we added the Ollama integration for real conversational ability, and that was pretty awesome too. One thing became clear right away: Home Assistant is both a practical solution and an ongoing hobby. Ask any longtime user and they will joke about spending 70 hours to save 30 seconds of effort. With thousands of integrations available, it stays fun to keep improving. Whether you are managing lights, tracking energy use, or sending the robot vacuum to tackle the dust bunnies under the bed, there is always something new to try or refine if you enjoy tinkering.
Home Assistant
What is Home Assistant? It is the open-source home automation platform that finally let us run a smart home on our own terms. It lives on a device in our house instead of someone else's servers, talks to nearly every gadget we already own, and puts privacy and local control first. You can start simple with lights and switches, then keep adding whatever you like: energy monitoring, robot vacuums, voice commands, or even a local AI for actual conversations. It is powerful enough to replace the big-name assistants we ditched, flexible enough to grow with us, and honest enough to admit it can also become a rewarding (and occasionally time-consuming) hobby.
At its core is the Home Assistant server. Many people, including us, run it on a dedicated Raspberry Pi. For those who prefer not to tinker, there are purpose-built options like the Nabu Casa Home Assistant Green. Either way, that server becomes the heart of the system. Out of the box it works with thousands of smart home products, which makes migration surprisingly easy. Once everything is on the same network or VLAN, Home Assistant quickly spots the devices and offers to integrate them. It is almost too good at this. To this day it still cheerfully suggests connecting to our neighbors' unsecured smart home gadgets.
The user interface comes in two forms: a web dashboard and a dedicated mobile app. Home Assistant creates default dashboards that let you control everything right away, yet it is highly customizable. You can build additional dashboards that feel more meaningful for how you actually live.
It also includes two integrations we leaned on heavily from the start: Voice Assist and the Ollama integration. Voice Assist through the Nabu Casa cloud delivers the hands-free control most people expect, while the Ollama integration finally gave us the conversational chatbot we had been missing. And yes, there is still more to explore.
Beyond Controlling the Lights
It is absolutely cool to control the lights with your voice and even set schedules for them. Home Assistant's wide range of integrations opens up plenty of extra possibilities. For example, there is a built-in integration for the US National Weather Service that pulls in current conditions and forecasts. With a little searching you can add a weather widget to your dashboard without writing a single line of code. If you do enjoy a bit of programming, creating an automation that announces the forecast or current weather is surprisingly straightforward.
We took things one step further by adding SwitchBot Digital Thermometer Hygrometers both inside and outside our homes. These give us truly local readings through an encrypted Matter integration. Matter is an open-source, IP-based connectivity standard from the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). Because it is built directly into Home Assistant, we can keep these sensors fully offline and local.
When we converted a robot vacuum to use the Valetudo solution, integrating it with Home Assistant only required enabling the MQTT integration. Similarly, when we were testing the Reolink home surveillance cameras we were happy to discover a native integration. Honestly, there is not much we have tested that cannot be integrated with Home Assistant. Even the Apple TV 4K can be integrated, though we have not done it yet.
There are also extra enhancements available, such as Music Assistant, which can stream your music collection over the speakers of your choice. In short, there is no end to how you can make the Home Assistant solution truly yours.
Always Improving
For those who love to tinker or create, the opportunities never really stop. Our first experiments with Ollama used Meta's llama3.2 model because it fit neatly into the 16 GB of memory on the integrated graphics processor. Since then Ollama and the available models have improved several times over. We are now running Google's gemma4:26b and enjoying noticeably higher-quality chats. No new hardware was required, just a decent high-speed internet connection and a willingness to keep tinkering.
In the same spirit, as we recently wrote about, we have been refining the Voice Assist pipeline while testing the fuller-sounding FutureProofHomes Satellite 1.1 smart speakers.
We have also moved well beyond basic smart plugs. Encrypted Matter-integrated energy-monitoring plugs now give us a clearer picture of our actual energy use and point out easy places to improve.
And that is before we even get into the automations. With help and ideas from the active user community we have built everything from a voice that delivers the complete forecast in almost painful detail, to one that will cheerfully answer "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" We have even begun testing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) setups that combine Ollama with offline Wikipedia data from Kiwix so Voice Assist can pull in real knowledge without leaving the house. There is always another privacy-focused tool waiting to be woven in.
And that is always the driving force and focus: smart home automation with privacy.
Where Will You Take It?
We love Home Assistant because it truly lets us have our cake and eat it too. We get reliable smart-home automation while keeping a much higher degree of privacy and local control. The ability to shape the system around our own needs and preferences feels wonderful, and the complete absence of those random middle-of-the-night statements from the speakers is quietly comforting.
Like most useful tools, Home Assistant can be as simple or as deep as you want it to be. You can start with a few lights and a voice command, or you can keep layering on sensors, automations, local AI, and whatever else catches your interest. Either path works. The important part is that the choice stays yours.
After more than a year of living with it, we are still glad we made the switch. The system keeps improving, the community is always helpful, and every new integration or automation feels like a small win for both convenience and privacy. Wherever you decide to take it, we hope it feels just as satisfying for you.
Remember: We may not have anything to hide, but everything to protect.
