Blog posts for roadmap 2024 H1! (#33192)

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Roadmap 2024 H1: A home-approved smart home, peace of mind, and more!"
+description: "Our first detailed roadmap outlining the direction of the continued development of the Home Assistant project"
+date: 2024-06-12 00:00:01
+date_formatted: "June 12, 2024"
+author: Madelena Mak
+comments: true
+categories: Announcements Roadmap
+og_image: /images/blog/2024-06-roadmap-2024h1/banner.png
+---
+
+<p><img src='/images/blog/2024-06-roadmap-2024h1/banner.png' class='no-shadow' alt='Banner for Roadmap 2024 H1'/></p>
+
+During our [State of the Open Home livestream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa__fLArsFk&amp;t=7649s) in April, we presented our roadmaps for Home Assistant, open protocols, and Home Assistant Cloud. If you’re not sure what a roadmap is, or why we aren’t just listing features and dates - please read our intro to [Home Assistant Roadmaps](/blog/2024/06/11/roadmap-introduction).
+
+There has already been a lot of great discussion about these roadmaps in the community, and we would really like to encourage you to give your thoughts in the comments of this blog - as they will inform [how the roadmap evolves over time](/blog/2024/06/11/roadmap-introduction/#how-are-roadmaps-made).
+
+You can skip straight to the sections you’re most interested:
+
+* [Home Assistant: “A Home-Approved Smart Home”](#home-assistant-a-home-approved-smart-home)
+* [Home Assistant Cloud: “Peace of Mind”](#home-assistant-cloud-peace-of-mind)
+* [Open standards: “Certified Quality”](#open-standards-certified-quality)
+
+~ [Madelena](https://github.com/madelena) & [JLo](https://github.com/jlpouffier)
+
+_Big thanks to everyone who had given feedback to us throughout the entire process!_
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Home Assistant: “A Home-Approved Smart Home”
+
+<p><img src='/images/blog/2024-06-roadmap-2024h1/ha-roadmap-2024h1.png' class='no-shadow' alt="[Home Assistant Roadmap 2024 H1"/></p>
+
+The mission of the Home Assistant project is to become the best smart home platform that embodies the Open Home vision (privacy, choice, sustainability), powered by a helpful open-source user community.
+
+A smart home platform should allow users to observe, control, automate, and anticipate the key functions within a home, which provides safety, security, comfort, convenience, personalization, and accessibility to its residents.
+
+Through our user research, we learned that while Home Assistant is a powerful platform for people who prioritize better privacy and customizability, we also found that adoption within their homes is another story. Our users have often gone to great pains to make Home Assistant easier to use for other members of their household, either by using another app as the user interface or hiding any visible traces of the platform altogether. We call the adoption of Home Assistant by other household members the [“Home Approval Factor”](https://newsletter.openhomefoundation.org/open-home-approval-factor/).
+
+Therefore, in the roadmap ahead for Home Assistant, we propose that our contributor community and us, the core maintainers, should focus our efforts on making Home Assistant more home-approved.  This can be done by improving the touchpoints that all members of the household will interact with, such as automations, dashboards, and voice assistants, while maintaining the power and depth of the platform for our power users and admins. Our plan is divided into the following areas:
+
+### Dashboards
+
+We have been hard at work renovating our dashboards since last year. Moving forward, we are focused on making the dashboard user experience better for all users.
+
+#### Current priority: Make customization of dashboards easy and intuitive
+
+With the new Sections view layout, better tile cards, and our incredibly well-received [drag and drop](/blog/2024/03/04/dashboard-chapter-1/) 🐉, we have recently begun our work on making dashboard customization easy and intuitive. We aim to implement an intuitive and organized grid system for dashboards. We will need community contributions to update our current cards to fit the grid system.
+
+#### Next priority: Make default dashboards more useful and relevant
+
+Our current default dashboard gives our users two choices: Either list every entity the system is connected to or start from scratch. With dashboard blueprints, we know that we can make the default dashboards more useful than that. We will need your input to optimize them to display the most relevant information from the get-go.
+
+#### Later priority: Improve privacy in user, guest, and public access
+
+The inability to fine-tune access to Home Assistant by guests or other members of the family has been a pain point requested by many of our users. We want to investigate ways to mitigate this while improving the privacy of the household.
+
+### Voice assistants
+
+Since last year, we have built our voice assistant framework from scratch with our [“Year of the Voice”](/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/) initiative. Now that the infrastructure is in place, we want to make sure that it will be usable for everyone (before the demise of Alexa and Google Assistant 😜).
+
+#### Current priority 1: Improve Assist capabilities out of the box
+
+Our [research has shown](https://community.home-assistant.io/t/poll-what-do-you-use-your-voice-assistant-for-what-do-you-expect-it-to-do-multiple-selections/693669) users are most interested in us improving out-of-the-box capabilities of Assist, for instance, timers, reminders, and music controls.
+
+#### Current priority 2: Make Assist easier to start with
+
+At the moment, there are several things you need to install or configure to get started with voice. We want to make it easier to set up and onboard. There are already some good hardware choices to start using voice, but we’re exploring building our voice satellite hardware to create a more plug-and-play experience.
+
+### Automations
+
+Automation is one of the cornerstones of the home automation industry. The ability to automate your home so that it does what you expect when you expect it is both fascinating and extremely rewarding for users, regardless of their experience level. Today, the automation engine of Home Assistant is one of the most powerful in the market. However, this comes at a cost: It is not the simplest to approach.
+
+#### Current priority 1: Make automations easier to organize
+
+As users grow their smart home, they will create more automation. Our automations are listed in a large table and can get easily disorganized as it grows. Earlier this year, we did a lot to improve the organization of automations, including [labels, filters, and categories](https://youtu.be/g3Xo0ArcMaY?si=OrqvNDASLFvyKhEs), which in return not only made automations easier to organize, but also almost every table in the Home Assistant settings.
+
+#### Current priority 2: Make automations easier to create
+
+While we made headway earlier this year in making automations easier to create, we need a more comprehensive effort with a full product development cycle of research, discovery, ideation, and validation to confidently make design and implementation decisions. As of now, many seemingly simple automations can be too complex to create and debug, and there is a lot of room for improvement. We foresee that when this opportunity is done, admins and housemates can easily create automations.
+
+* * *
+
+### Research
+
+To make informed product decisions, we need to base our work on solid research. Therefore, we have been building out our research capabilities, both in terms of user research and technology research.
+
+#### User research
+
+In order for all of us in our community to make the right product, design, and engineering decisions, we need all of us to have a clear picture of who our users really are. Last year, we did some initial research, mostly focused on dashboards. This year, we want to get the full picture with complete foundational research of our users.
+
+Secondly, of the three Open Home values, privacy, choice, and sustainability, while we have a pretty solid understanding of choice and some understanding of sustainability, the idea of privacy can benefit from more clarity. We want a better understanding of what privacy really means to a home and its residents.
+
+#### Technology research (R&D)
+
+Yes, large language models (LLMs) are a hot trend, but that’s not why we’re exploring them. We know there are very interesting problems they can solve in the home, and with the amount of data our users collect in their history, we believe that there is much power underneath Home Assistant yet to be unearthed and it is uniquely positioned to be the smart home platform for AI. [Our AI vision](/blog/2024/06/07/ai-agents-for-the-smart-home/) lays down the foundation for what we want to do with AI and LLMs next.
+
+In order to help AI make better decisions, we need a better understanding of the context of what each device actually is. To do so, we need to refine our information architecture. For instance, we recently rolled out floors helping Home Assistant better understand your house. This is no small task, but it could be vital in implementing better voice or even AI in the home.
+
+* * *
+
+## Home Assistant Cloud: “Peace of Mind”
+
+[Home Assistant Cloud](https://www.nabucasa.com/), powered by our commercial partner Nabu Casa brings, to the many, the hard-to-reach features of Home Assistant usually reserved for power users with expensive hardware at home, with no compromise on privacy.
+
+Currently, Home Assistant Cloud provides the simplest and safest way to access your Home Assistant instance anywhere in the world and connect to third-party cloud-connected voice assistants, like Google’s and Alexa’s offerings. Our newest ability added to Cloud is the ability to offload the resource-intensive tasks of speech-to-text and text-to-speech. This allows our users to have power-efficient hardware at home, like the Home Assistant Green, which uses three watts and performs tasks usually reserved for hundred-watt home servers.
+
+For the next phase of Home Assistant Cloud, we want to continue to build features that adhere to our mission, as stated above. The theme for the upcoming initiatives revolve around providing peace of mind for our users:
+
+#### Current priority: Hardening security
+
+We want to harden our security, providing more control for remote access and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for your Nabu Casa account.
+
+#### Next priority: Encrypted cloud backup
+This would allow users to have a more resilient installation of Home Assistant, so if your instance completely breaks down, it can be restored from the cloud.
+
+#### Later priority: Cloud monitoring
+
+If your Home Assistant instance goes down, we’ll be able to detect it and send an email notification. This will allow you to monitor your downtime, and hopefully avoid more of it in the future, keeping your whole family happy 😁.
+
+If you are currently a subscriber of Home Assistant Cloud, thank you again for your generous support of our project, and please let us know what we can do to improve our service. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can check it out [here](https://nabucasa.com)!
+
+* * *
+
+## Open standards: “Certified Quality”
+
+We believe open standards are critical to providing choices for the future of the open home, and that is why we have put a lot of work into supporting current and emerging standards. They provide a way for manufacturers to provide broad compatibility, but they also provide peace of mind for users by ensuring the longevity of the devices.
+
+All our teams are currently working very hard on certification - we want to make sure all our open standards implementations are up to industry standards.
+
+### Zigbee
+For Zigbee, we already have a well-established hardware solution via our [Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1](/skyconnect/) (formerly known as the SkyConnect). We continue contributing code and refining ZHA and Zigpy, the software powering Zigbee in Home Assistant.
+
+### Matter
+
+#### Current priority 1: Certification
+
+Matter is served via our Matter Server, which is evolving with the standard, and we will continue to the first home automation system that adopts the latest Matter standards. Our Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 hardware also supports this standard via its support of Matter over Thread.
+
+#### Current priority 2: Device Commissioning
+
+There are still some big challenges that need to be addressed like device commissioning, which is currently overly complex, and we’re working with the industry to improve this.
+
+### Z-Wave
+
+#### Current priority: Certification
+
+This year, we made several big announcements with our support of Z-Wave. We joined the Z-Wave Alliance in February this year and have been [working to improve our Z-Wave JS software](/blog/2024/05/08/zwave-is-not-dead).
+
+#### Next priority: Home Assistant Connect Hardware for Z-Wave
+
+To build the most seamless user experience for this protocol, we’re building our own Z-Wave stick to connect devices to Home Assistant. This new Z-Wave stick will join our Home Assistant Connect family of products.
+
+* * *
+
+## What’s next?
+Our roadmap is an open call for contributions in the product areas we are focusing on. It outlines what the core maintainers of the Home Assistant project will work on in the near future. This is a tool for our contributors and us, the project maintainers, to plan ahead for our collective future. As this is a living document, we will revisit and update our roadmap every half year.
+
+For more information on how the roadmaps were created and how you can contribute, please check out [this blog post here](/blog/2024/06/11/roadmap-introduction).

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "A roadmap for Home Assistant"
+description: "Learn more about what we came up with the roadmap, what it entails, and how you can build upon it together!"
+date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
+date_formatted: "June 12, 2024"
+author: Madelena Mak
+comments: true
+categories: Announcements Roadmap
+og_image: images/blog/2024-06-roadmap-introduction/art.jpg
+---
+
+<p class="img no-shadow"><img src='/images/blog/2024-06-roadmap-introduction/art.jpg' alt='Artwork for the roadmap introduction'/><i>Art by Clelia Rella</i></p>
+
+During our [State of the Open Home livestream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa__fLArsFk&t=7649s), we presented the future of the open home with the announcement of our first roadmap.
+
+Over the past few years, we have begun the practice of giving a theme for the direction we wanted to take the Home Assistant project towards each year. Last year, we had the successful [Year of the Voice](/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/), in which we built our voice assistant architecture from the ground up. And before that, we had “[Streamlining Experiences](/blog/2022/01/19/streamlining-experiences/)” where we took our first stab at improving the UX.
+
+Having a good set of goals allows us to focus our community and resources to build new projects rapidly together. With the Year of the Voice, we have attracted new contributors who are experts in wake words and voice technologies, translators of many languages, and hobbyists in building impressive one-of-a-kind voice assistants. We want to continue this success by laying out the strategy and direction for the continuous development of the Home Assistant project, and a product roadmap is a perfect tool for such a purpose.
+
+Our roadmap is an open call for contributions in the product areas we are focusing on. Unlike many public roadmaps of commercial products, this is not a marketing ploy to attract customers to buy into nebulous, unrealized future features. It is a tool for our contributors and us, the project maintainers, to plan ahead for our collective future.
+
+For this blog post, I’d like to detail how we came up with the roadmap, what it entails, and how you can build upon it together.
+
+~ Madelena
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Where can I find the roadmap?
+
+Our roadmaps will be published in our blog in the [Roadmap category](/blog/categories/roadmap/), this allows the community to provide feedback and discuss our direction in the forums easily.
+
+Our first roadmap for 2024 H1 can be found [here](/blog/2024/06/11/roadmap-2024h1/).
+
+## What is a roadmap?
+
+### What it is
+
+A roadmap provides the general direction of where we want to take our projects next, aka the “North Star” ⭐.
+
+With existing products, it can be easy to operate on autopilot, especially when we are in a rhythm of building new features. Once in a while, it is important for us to understand the strategic context behind why we are doing what we are doing for our users, and figure out how we can get there in the long term.
+
+A conversation about our roadmap with our community and users is an opportunity for us to verify our understanding of your needs before actually spending time and resources building them. Ideally, if we had done an excellent job in our user research, then the roadmap should merely confirm what you need, and there should be no surprises.
+
+### What it is not
+
+We want to emphasize that this is **_not_ a list of upcoming features**, nor does it indicate the exact timeframe of when features will be built. We will not know the exact features we need to build until we have a good grasp of the problem encountered through user research. Usually, the closer the priority is, the clearer the picture is, and the more likely we know what features to build.
+
+## What is on our roadmap?
+
+Our roadmap has three major elements: initiatives, themes, and timeframes.
+
+### Initiatives
+
+Our roadmap contains the list of initiatives (also known as “product opportunities” for all you PM nerds) that we intend to work on, such as “making automations easier to organize”. They indicate the overall outcome that we want to achieve. Sometimes, there would be obvious features that we all know we should be working on, such as the most requested “drag and drop” feature in order to “make dashboards easier and more intuitive to customize and use”. Sometimes the answers aren’t as obvious, which is when user research would help us a great deal in providing clarity and helping us brainstorm solutions.
+
+### Themes
+
+These initiatives are organized by themes, usually in the different product areas of the Home Assistant project, or by the common goal that these initiatives would achieve. To coordinate our efforts, each of these themes are usually led and driven by the same group of maintainers composed of developers, designers, and a product owner, who are passionate about the subject matter. For example, I love dashboards and that’s my current focus, while [@JLo](https://github.com/jlpouffier) loves Assist and is making great strides in those areas with our contributors.
+
+### Timeframes
+
+Our timeframes are divided roughly into what’s current, next, and later priorities. We decided against using exact dates because, on the one hand, guaranteeing a due date on features we might not even need to build puts unnecessary pressure on our maintainers. On the other hand, we cannot predict if or when our contributors will make contributions to our top initiatives. In general, a current priority is about three months, next is another three months after what’s current is done, and so on.
+
+## How are roadmaps made?
+
+We want to make sure that this is an open source, open development, and open design process. So we, as the core project maintainers, will keep the dialog open to feedback and changes from our contributors and our community.
+
+For our first roadmap in 2024 H1, we worked hard for 7 months to build it from scratch in the following steps:
+
+1. **Foundation**: We make sure that our [founder’s vision](/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/) of what the best Home Assistant can be is reflected fully in the North Star of the roadmap. We also agree upon the purpose of the roadmap.
+
+2. **Collective feedback**: After that, we met with the core project maintainers of various product areas, from frontend, voice, OS, documentation, open protocols, ESPHome, and more. We collected hundreds of problems that they know are the most concerning to our users and their ideas on how these problems can be solved. We also scoured and scanned through every top feature request on our forums and from previous Months of What the Heck. We collated them into one huge list of product issues we need to solve.
+
+3. **Prioritization**: We organized and categorized these issues into various initiatives that we can pursue. Finally, we prioritized all these initiatives by the number of potential users who could benefit from them, how big an impact they can make, how certain we are in the issue, or if research is needed before proceeding. The final result is then organized into the roadmap that you see now.
+
+A roadmap is a _living document_, and we intend to adjust our bearings and revisit it every half-year. For instance, when we improve initiatives to an adequate level or if the needs of our users and community change, we will move our resources to focus on the next important priorities.
+
+Our next update on the roadmap will be around late October to early November, after collecting your feedback from our infamous Month of What the Heck.
+
+## How to use our roadmap
+
+As I mentioned before, our roadmap is not a list of future features, but an open call for contributions in the product areas we are focusing on.
+
+If you would like to contribute to the Home Assistant project, I hope that our roadmap can provide you with ideas and guidance on what you can do. There are a number of ways you can support this journey. Let’s build the future of the Open Home together!
+
+- **Develop**: If you are a developer, of course you can contribute your code!
+
+  If you are an expert in the areas we are currently focused on in our roadmap, please feel free to reach out to us directly on [Discord](/join-chat). For example, if our current focus is to “improve voice assistant abilities out of the box” and if you were a wake word or LLM expert, that’s perfect! Please reach out and see where you can help.
+
+  If you know what you want to build, awesome! Be sure to check out our developer docs and learn about our [review process](https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/review-process).
+
+  If you don’t have any ideas on what to code, please feel free to check out our [GitHub issues](https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues) and our [top feature requests](https://community.home-assistant.io/c/feature-requests/13/l/latest?order=votes). You may also chat with other folks on Discord to find out what needs your help the most.
+
+- **Design**: If you are a product person or a designer, we need you! Many of our features and contributions need great product goals, research, and design that solve real problems. Help us brainstorm ideas and solutions for the problems we want to solve on our roadmap, or report any new unforeseen problems that you notice in our community.
+
+- **Participate in user research**: If you and your housemates or family are interested, we would love to have you as part of our user research pool. From time to time, we will send out surveys or invite users to user interviews. This allows us to get an objective understanding of our users and validate and test our assumptions. Sign up to be part of the [Home Assistant User Research Group](https://forms.clickup.com/2533032/f/2d9n8-12931/52N1KK00E9BXEW71TN).
+
+- **Guide our direction**: As already mentioned, we use our [Feature Request](https://community.home-assistant.io/c/feature-requests/) and [Month of What The Heck?](https://community.home-assistant.io/c/what-the-heck/56) forums to guide the creation and prioritization of the roadmap. The number of votes and the amount of thoughtful discussions and creative ideas matter, so please participate in the threads and help guide the direction of our project.
+
+And that’s all you need to know about our roadmaps! Thanks for reading! Looking forward to collaborating with you on the Home Assistant project soon!
+
+~ Madelena
+
+## FAQ
+
+#### 1. I want feature X!
+
+Sure thing, we hear you. If you really want feature X, can you tell us and everyone in our community more about it, such as, what problems will this feature solve? Better yet, is it a recurring problem you have noticed that will help many other people? Use cases, research, and various evidence help us all decide whether we will proceed with such a feature. Make some noise on our forums, submit it to our feature requests, and see if it resonates with others. Maybe a contributor can help you out if the need is strong enough
+
+#### 2. I think the Home Assistant project should go in direction Y.
+
+If you have a brilliant vision of what Home Assistant can become, please feel free to discuss them openly in the comments section of the roadmap, or post your thoughts on our forums. Our direction is determined by the collective needs of our users, guided by our Open Home values of privacy, choice, and sustainability. Any ideas that can benefit these areas may be considered to become part of our project vision.