Home Assistant follows a monthly release cadence, where the first Wednesday of every month is the release day. However, the Wednesday before that (so, the last Wednesday of every month) sees the release of a beta for testing first. September's update, Home Assistant 2025.9, brings a few changes, but one of the biggest sees big improvements to the creation of automations.

As is the case with beta updates, there are a couple of caveats. The first is that these releases are expected to be unstable, and as such, you should only use them if you have a backup to fall back to and you're okay with things not necessarily working perfectly. The second is that features shown off in the beta might not make it to the stable release, so while we can reasonably assume that the new automation flow will survive, it's not a guarantee.

This is a big, much-needed change to automations

And it looks great

As someone who writes a lot of automations in Home Assistant, the built-in editor can be frustrating at the best of times. Clicking individual actions in the automation expanded it in place, and it could get kind of overwhelming when working in a large automation to have your expanded options be in the same place as the rest of the automation, too. When working on long, complex automations, it quickly became hard to keep track of everything going on.

Now, though, clicking an action will open a box on the right-hand side for easier inspection and modification, making use of all of the unused screen space that previously made up most of the display in the automation editor. This serves two purposes:

  • Keeping the flow clean and easy to read
  • Making it easier to read and modify individual blocks

On mobile, it's similar, too. Individual blocks expand into a card that covers the bottom half of the display, allowing you to scroll up and down above it in your automation. The Home Assistant Product Manager, Jean-Loïc Pouffier, has posted in the Home Assistant Discord asking for feedback on the mobile implementation, so it sounds like it may be tweaked before release.

Right now, deleting individual blocks is a little bit finicky. To delete it, you have to click the block, then on the right-hand side, click the delete button inside the block editor. The overflow menu for blocks only contains "move up" and "move down" options, but you can still drag blocks around if you'd prefer.

It's not just automations

Tile history is great

What do you do if you want to show the history of a sensor in Home Assistant? You can use graphs to do that, but a basic graph pulled from the recorded data can be a little bit cumbersome to set up. Now, the tile card has a new "history" feature, so that you can add a pre-drawn graph to the card that will show in the bottom half of it. In the above screenshot, you can see my graphs that are shown inside the tile card.

As well, added to tile cards are buttons for automation, script, and button entities. Text can be changed to display a standard button text or custom text, so it's a seamless way to add additional functionality to a tile card. While you could previously press your tile cards to treat them as a button, this adds an explicit button to the card itself for pressing.

Other additions to dashboard controls include:

  • Fan direction and oscillation controls
  • Valve open/close and position controls
  • A tile card supporting date and time, and allowing for setting a date

There is also a new + button on the dashboard, which can be used to add a new device, automation, area, or person.

When it comes to voice, there are two big changes. The first is the ability to control volume of media players natively through Home Assistant using your voice, and the second is that the default Assistant (so, non-LLM-based) now supports "fuzzy matching" for English-speaking users. It basically improves voice matching drastically to understand words and sentences.

Maintenance-wise, you can now see where your storage has gone. Previously, while you could see an overview of how much storage you have free (and how much you're using), there was no way to see how much storage was taken up by the individual components of Home Assistant.

Finally, there are a bunch of integration-related changes. Three new integrations were added:

  • SEKO PoolDose
  • Sleep as Android
  • ToGrill Bluetooth BBQ

For existing integrations, Reolink, including speech and doorbell volume controls, the PlayStation Network integration now supports sending notifications, and UniFi switches now get individual switch port control.

Assuming all of these features make it through the beta test this week, then all of these features will roll out to users on the 3rd of September! If you want to try out the beta, you can check it out by going to Settings, Updates, and clicking Join beta channel in the top right overflow menu.