Author: P.J. Leimgruber
We just shipped native Home Assistant integration for the OpenHome DevKit. One click from your dashboard. No terminal. No YAML files. No manual setup. Your device becomes a fully voice-controlled smart home hub.
What We Built
From the OpenHome dashboard, you can now install a complete, locally-running Home Assistant instance directly on your DevKit. It auto-creates your admin user, detects your timezone and location, connects to OpenHome, and starts on boot all without a single prompt. You click Install, walk away, and come back to a working smart home platform.
Update when a new version drops. Uninstall cleanly if you want to start fresh. Every operation is one button and runs in the background so your dashboard stays responsive.
Once installed, open http://<your-devkit-ip>:8123 in any browser on your network and you're looking at the full Home Assistant dashboard — thousands of supported integrations at your fingertips. Lights, thermostats, sensors, media players, locks, cameras, motion detectors. If Home Assistant supports it, your DevKit runs it.
Voice Control That Actually Works
Here's where it gets interesting. Home Assistant alone gives you a dashboard. OpenHome gives you a voice.
Connect a smart device to Home Assistant, build a Local Ability in the OpenHome Live Editor, and you're controlling your home by speaking to it:
"Turn off the living room lights."
"Set the thermostat to 70 degrees."
"Is the front door locked?"
"Make it warmer in here."
"Dim the bedroom to twenty percent."
The conversation is natural and contextual. Say "turn on the kitchen light" and then "make it warm" — the system remembers which light you're talking about. When you're done, just say "that's all" and the session ends cleanly.
We built this on top of Local Abilities, which means the device-side logic runs directly on your DevKit where Home Assistant lives. The LLM converts your speech into structured intents, the DevKit executes them against Home Assistant's API, and you get a spoken confirmation. The round trip is fast because everything that touches your devices stays local.
A Full Walkthrough, Ready to Copy
We didn't just ship the feature — we shipped a complete, working example. The documentation at docs.openhome.com/building-abilities/home-assistant includes a full Tasmota smart lights walkthrough: pairing a bulb over MQTT, the complete main.py and devkit_functions.py code, and a conversation loop that handles on/off, brightness, color, color temperature, multi-device targeting by name, and graceful session exits. Copy it, paste it into the Live Editor, connect a Tasmota bulb, and you're controlling lights by voice in minutes.
The architecture is designed to extend. We built it around an integration registry — to add support for a new device type beyond Tasmota lights, you add one entry to the registry in main.py and one handler in devkit_functions.py. The voice loop, prompt builder, and dispatch logic stay the same. Thermostats, locks, blinds, media players — the pattern is identical.
Why This Matters
Most voice assistants treat smart home as a closed system. You get the integrations they decided to build, on the timeline they decided to ship them. OpenHome flips that. Home Assistant's ecosystem is massive and open, and now the entire thing is accessible through your DevKit with voice control powered by whatever LLM you choose.
This is what an open AI Speaker makes possible. The platform doesn't gate what you can connect. You pick the devices, you build the abilities, you own the experience. We just made the hard parts — installation, authentication, device discovery, voice intent parsing — disappear.
Get a DevKit
We're accepting applications for the next round of DevKit hardware at dev.openhome.com. Spots are limited, and we prioritize builders who are active in our GitHub and Discord communities. If you've been waiting for a reason to jump in, a voice-controlled smart home you actually own is a pretty good one.