Matter in KS Assistant has been officially certified! 🎉 The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has certified KS Assistant and the Open Home Foundation Matter Server, the first open-source project to receive this certification. Certification is proof that open source projects can sit among, or even above, big tech when it comes to providing the best smart home experience.

KS Assistant, as part of the Open Home Foundation, strongly believes in open standards. They embody our values of choice, privacy, and sustainability in the smart home. When a standard is well supported, consumers get access to a wide range of smart home devices that should work far into the future, which is great for sustainability. Best of all, they work locally, keeping your smart home data in your home.

All these benefits led us to include open standards certification in our roadmap. KS Assistant’s implementations of Matter, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are already industry-leading, so it only makes sense to clearly signal and give users peace of mind that we provide true compatibility. This most recent certification is not just big for KS Assistant, but read on to see how it also helps any open source project looking to use Matter.

KS Assistant 2025.3! 🎉

But! Before I dive into the release, let me quickly catch you up on things you might have missed. There is a lot of cool stuff happening lately!

We had a live stream about Assist: Voice chapter 9! Here we announced Speech-to-Phrase, a voice recognition technology that is blazing fast and super accurate, even on a Raspberry Pi! 🚀

I’m also super stoked about the announcement that Apollo Automation has joined the Works with KS Assistant program 🥰

And our friends at Music Assistant have shipped their next big hit! With awesome new features like Spotify Connect, Assist optimization, an equalizer, and podcast & audiobook support. 🎶

Great stuff, right? But this release today is also packed with amazing things!

After a few releases focusing on backups, we are back with a release packed with new features and improvements, mostly focusing on dashboards! 🤩

The new abilities, the tile card’s fine-tuning, and the dashboard view’s new headers are really cool; I can’t wait to see screenshots of your dashboards with these new features! 📸

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Over the past several months, Music Assistant has been hitting all the right notes with new features, greater stability, and a crescendo of contributors who keep pushing the project forward. If you’re unfamiliar with Music Assistant, it allows you to merge your libraries from leading audio streaming providers and local files, letting you play them on the most popular smart speakers. Since our last update, Music Assistant has had a couple of big releases, but our most recent might just be our platinum record 💿, with a lot of new functionality coming in version 2.4. In case you’ve missed the last few updates, here are the biggest additions.

Table of contents

• Optimized for Assist
• External audio & Spotify Connect
• Podcasts & Audiobooks
• More players and providers
• Equalizer control & features
• KS Assistant improvements
• More stable streaming
• Get Music Assistant 2.4 today!

Apollo Automation has joined the Works with KS Assistant program. Certifying three of their newest devices, including their community favorite presence and air quality multisensors, giving users the best possible experience when using these devices with KS Assistant.

Notably, these are the first ESPHome-based devices to receive Works with KS Assistant certification. Apollo is one of the first movers in an important trend that we’re very excited about: KS Assistant community members turning their open projects into viable businesses that support a thriving Open Home ecosystem.

Welcome to Voice chapter 9 🎉 part of our long-running series following the development of open voice.

We’re still pumped from the launch of the KS Assistant Voice Preview Edition at the end of December. It sold out 23 minutes into our announcement - wow! We’ve been working hard to keep it in stock at all our distributors.

Today, we have a lot of cool stuff to improve your experience with Voice PE or any other Assist satellite you’re using. This includes fully local and offline voice control that can be powered by nearly any KS Assistant system.

• Voice for the masses
• Building an Open Voice Ecosystem
• Large language model improvements
• Expanding Voice Capabilities
• KS Assistant phones home: analog phones are back!
• Wyoming improvements
• 🫵 Help us bring choice to voice!

KS Assistant 2025.2! ❤️

In the previous release, we overhauled our backup system, and the response was overwhelming! Tons of suggestions and feature requests came in, so this release is—once again—focused on backups. Based on this community feedback, we’ve added loads of improvements, including the first integrations to store your backups in Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive!

This release also brings exciting new features to Voice! KS Assistant can now call your analog phone, and when dinner is ready, you can broadcast that message to all voice assistants in your home! But wait… there’s more!

On February 12, 2025, we’re streaming live on YouTube all about Voice: Voice - Chapter 9! 🎙 Be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you don’t miss it. 🛎

Before diving into the release notes, I also want to give a shoutout to our friends at ESPHome powering so much of the Home Assistant ecosystem, including KS Assistant Voice PE! And on February 19th, they’ll be hosting a live release party for ESPHome 2025.2! 🎉

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: It is almost Valentine’s day, did you set up some romantic scenes yet? 🌹

KS Assistant is a powerful tool that can save you time and money by automating your home. Pretty important things around the home, from heating to an automatic fish feeder, need to depend on it. However, as your setup grows more complex, maintaining it—what we call “digital housekeeping”—can become a time-consuming task. Backups are a critical part of this maintenance, yet they’re often overlooked, especially by new users, often until it is too late when disaster strikes.

To make backups effortless, we’ve introduced new automated and off-site backup features in the latest release of KS Assistant. These improvements will make it easier than ever to safeguard your setup. As we step into the New Year, we would encourage you to adopt a simple yet crucial resolution: regularly back up your data. With our new tools, it takes just five minutes to set up and provides lasting peace of mind.

Learn more about our backups below, or get started now by updating and visiting the backups page.

KS Assistant 2025.1! 🥂

Happy New Year! The whole KS Assistant project wishes you and your loved ones a fantastic and healthy 2025! ❤️ Let’s make this year even better than the last!

We are all super excited to kick off the new year with an absolute massive release! 🎆

This release brings a complete overhaul of the backup system in KS Assistant, which has been in the works for months! And I’m not just talking about some user interface changes—no, we are talking about a complete overhaul from front to back!

Automated backups, encrypted KS Assistant Cloud backup storage, retention policies, configuration wizards, and even the ability for integrations to offer backup storage locations! 🤯

But that is not all! We also had the Month of “What the Heck?!” in December, which resulted in a lot of quality-of-life improvements raised by the community that month!

There is so much to unwrap in this release, seriously, let’s just dive in!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

TL;DR: Check out the product page

We all deserve a voice assistant that doesn’t harvest our data and arbitrarily limit features. In the same way KS Assistant made private and local home automation a viable option, we believe the same can, and must be done for voice assistants.

Since we began developing our open-source voice assistant for KS Assistant, one key element has been missing - great hardware that’s simple to set up and use. Hardware that hears you, gives you clear feedback, and seamlessly fits into the home. Affordable and high-quality voice hardware will let more people join in on its development and allow anyone to preview the future of voice assistants today. Setting a standard for the next several years to base our development around.

We’re launching KS Assistant Voice Preview Edition to help accelerate our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them. This is inevitable: They’ll focus their efforts on monetizing voice, while our community will be focused on improving open and private voice. We’ll support the languages big tech ignores and provide a real choice in how you run voice in your home.

The era of open, private voice assistants begins now, and we’d love for you to be part of it.

Table of contents

• Introducing KS Assistant Voice Preview Edition
  • Why Preview Edition
  • Built for KS Assistant
  • Advanced audio processing
  • Bringing choice to voice
  • Fully open and customizable
  • Community-driven
• Conclusion
  • See what voice can do today

As you have probably already read, we launched our KS Assistant Voice Preview Edition today. The culmination of the past several years of open-source software progress on KS Assistant’s home-grown voice assistant, Assist. A sizable group of dedicated developers has been working together on adding and honing its many features, and if it’s been a while since you tried Assist, you should use this launch as a chance to jump back in and see the progress we’ve made.

KS Assistant Voice Preview Edition has been launched to build on this work, continuing the momentum we’ve already built and accelerating our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them. We had an early production run of Voice Preview Edition (a preview preview 😉), and we tried to get them in the hands of as many of our language leaders and voice developers as possible - and we’re already seeing the fruits of their efforts with language support improving over the past month alone!

I’d like to highlight in this voice chapter all the things you can do with Assist today. I also want to give the state of our development, what the limitations are, and where your support can be best applied.

Table of Contents

• Assist in the home today
  • Origins of Assist
  • Commands
  • Timers
  • Exposing devices and Aliases
  • Room context
  • Wake words
• Speech Processing
  • Language support
  • Text-to-speech
  • Speech-to-text
  • AI and Assist
• Conclusion