Home Assistant follows a monthly release cadence, where the first Wednesday of every month brings a new update and the last Wednesday gives us the beta for what's coming next. The March 2026 update (version 2026.3) is now in beta, and it's one of those releases where a single feature overshadows everything else: wake word detection on your phone, through the Home Assistant app, without needing to use Termux and a Wyoming Satellite.

I typically install the beta on my setup every month, usually after giving it a day or two for the initial dust to settle. I've had 2026.3 running for a day now, and the big feature is pretty clear: Android users are finally getting on-device wake word detection through the Companion app. There's plenty more in this release too, from energy dashboard improvements to a new way to control your robot vacuum, but the wake word support is the most exciting by far.

As always, this is a beta. It's advisable to wait for the full release, and it's possible that some features may not make it to the final release in case of bugs or other broken functionality.

Wake word detection comes to Android

Local, on-device, and experimental

For a while now, wake word detection for Home Assistant has been purely the domain of dedicated hardware. ESPHome-based voice satellites, the Atom Echo, that kind of thing. If you wanted hands-free voice control, you needed a purpose-built device sitting in the room, or a rather convoluted setup involving Termux and Wyoming Satellite. That changes with 2026.3, because the Home Assistant Companion app on Android can now listen for wake words directly on your phone.

The implementation uses microWakeWord, the same technology that powers wake word detection on ESPHome devices. Three wake words are available right now, just like on other devices, and these are "Okay Nabu," "Hey Jarvis," and "Hey Mycroft." All processing happens locally on your device, so nothing is being transmitted to the cloud just to figure out if you said the wake word. This also differs from openWakeWord, which runs wake word detection on your Home Assistant server, facilitated by a continuous audio stream.

There is a catch, though. This is explicitly experimental, and the battery hit is real. Having your phone's microphone actively listening is never going to be free without being able to leverage the dedicated hardware to do so in the way other assistants do, and Nabu Casa is upfront about that. The good news is that you can set up automations to control when wake word detection is active. For example, you could have it automatically turn on when you're connected to your home WiFi, or automatically disable it when you leave the house. If you've got an older phone sitting in a dock somewhere, this could be a solid way to repurpose it as a voice satellite without buying any new hardware.

When multiple devices in your home hear the wake word at the same time, they handle it intelligently too. The fastest device to process the wake word is the one that activates, so you won't end up with three devices all trying to respond at once.

Wake word detection isn't the only voice improvement in this release, either. You can now ask your voice assistant to remove items from a to-do list, which complements the existing "complete item" intent that's been around for a while. It sounds like a small addition, but if you've ever tried managing a shopping list by voice in Home Assistant, you know how frustrating it was to only be able to add and complete items without being able to actually take something off the list. For those of us who use Home Assistant's to-do lists as the backbone of our grocery runs, this has been a genuine pain point. It won't make a splashy demo, but it makes the day-to-day experience so much better.

The energy dashboard gets a face lift

And your robot vacuum finally speaks Home Assistant's language

Home Assistant's dashboards have been getting some love recently, and the energy dashboard has quietly become one of its strongest features, though it's not always up to the challenge of more complex households. 2026.3 takes a step forward in cleaning it up in a few key ways. There are new tile cards that display real-time power, gas, and water consumption at a glance, and water now has its own Sankey visualization, something that was previously only available for electricity flows.

The configuration side has been cleaned up as well. What used to be a single setup screen is now split across three tabs for electricity, gas, and water, making it easier to manage each utility independently. The second tab has been renamed from "Energy" to "Electricity," which is one of those small changes that just makes sense once you see it. Tooltips in the graphs now include day-of-week information too, which is handy if you're trying to spot patterns in how your household uses energy throughout the week.

As for robot vacuum cleaners, this one is a pretty big deal. The new "vacuum.clean_area" action lets you direct your vacuum to Home Assistant areas directly, and these are the same areas you've already set up for the rest of your smart home. No more digging through manufacturer apps to find cryptic segment identifiers.

Matter, Ecovacs, and Roborock integrations all support this from launch, and automatic repair alerts will trigger if your vacuum's segment layout ever changes. It makes Home Assistant feel like it's actually in control of the device, rather than just relaying vendor commands. Voice support for area-based cleaning is planned as well, which should make "clean the kitchen" a viable voice command before long.

Automations just got a little bit smarter

Continue on error, no YAML required

Home Assistant has been getting big improvements to the automation editor over the last few months, and this is yet another one that closes the gap between YAML-based automations and UI-based automations. Specifically, there's now UI support for a "Continue on error" toggle.

If you've ever had a long automation sequence fail halfway through because one action threw an error, this is a big deal. The "Continue on error" toggle can be enabled for individual actions, and does exactly what it says. An error doesn't necessarily have to stop your entire automation, and lifting it from its YAML confines means that it's far more discoverable for regular folk who don't go that deep into automation.

As for how it works, it's pretty simple. There'll be a visual indicator that marks any action configured to keep going after an error, so you can see at a glance which steps in your automation are set to be fault-tolerant. This isn't a flashy feature by any means, but it fills a real gap.

New and improved integrations

17 new integrations and plenty of updates

As always, the community has been busy. This release adds 17 new integrations, including Liebherr for appliance monitoring, MTA New York City Transit for real-time transit data, Trane Local for HVAC control, and OneDrive for Business for cloud storage backups. InfluxDB, Ness Alarm, and Splunk can all now be configured through the UI instead of requiring YAML, which is a welcome change.

On the existing integration front, Matter gains carbon monoxide and TVOC sensor support, Reolink picks up PTZ diagonal rotation, SmartThings adds support for dual-cavity Samsung ovens and dishwasher controls, and Roborock can now manage Zeo washing machines. SwitchBot, UniFi Protect, SleepIQ, Proxmox VE, and Portainer all get useful updates too.

Since this is a beta, the usual caveats apply. Back up your system before updating, and expect that some things might not work perfectly right away. Features shown here are expected to land in the stable release, but nothing is guaranteed until it does. All in all, it's a packed beta, and Android wake word detection alone makes it one of the more exciting monthly releases in a while.