Out of all the apps I've discovered over the last few years, none comes close to how helpful Home Assistant has been. It's made it possible to ditch most of the smart apps from my phone, automate some daily tasks, and remove a bunch of subscriptions from my monthly outgoings.

It's more than this, though. Home Assistant also lets me claw back local control for many of my smart home devices that previously needed the cloud. Some of this is from adding local servers as add-ons, integrations, or a dongle for Zigbee connectivity. Others require a local LLM and a little more setup time to get working, and the worst offenders need some firewall rules to block them phoning home, but overall, I've gained local control while not losing much in the process. I can still control these devices from outside my home thanks to Home Assistant, which has simplified my home control considerably.

My voice assistant

This is a work in progress, but it's a small win

My home is studded with smart speakers. I've got Echo Dots, Nest Minis, and an assortment of Sonos, and they all have one big problem lately. They're just not that smart. I've lost track of how often they've not understood commands, or had commands that worked the day before not work again, and I'm tired of it. When I first picked up the smart speakers for voice control, everything was new and exciting, but lately, there seems to be a steep decline in the quality of the popular voice assistants.

There's also a noticeable lag when my queries and commands get sent off to the cloud to be processed, which gets tiresome. Don't get me wrong, I love voice control, I just want it to be local, under my control, and work faster. While I don't have the Home Assistant Voice device that replaces my smart speakers directly, I can still use the Home Assistant app, and voice commands are faster than searching through the tiles and tabs. I can do this thanks to Whisper, Piper, and a local LLM, which combines speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and the local AI model to handle the bits in between: hands-free control, no more cloud.

Yoder YS640S pellet grill

Fire isn't meant to be on the internet

I'll admit, this one is slightly a work in progress, because I currently have my Yoder pellet grill integrated into Home Assistantvia API calls to the FireBoard cloud. That removes one app from my phone, but it's not exactly what I want. But the FireBoard controller that does all the smart control of the grill can also connect via Bluetooth, and is MQTT-compatible. That means I can use MQTT Explorer to debug things and find out local controls, and that's on my list of to-do projects.

This is part of the fun of Home Assistant. It's not just a platform to plug in skills and addons made by the manufacturers, it's a fully open platform for creating your own integrations, control methods, dashboards, and anything else you can dream up. I'm terrible at learning new skills when I don't have a focus, but Home Assistant has provided that locus so I can learn automation, basic coding skills, and debugging by poking at my smart home devices and seeing which ones I can control.

Philips Hue lighting

I've always hated the Hue Bridge and now it's gone

Philips Hue was one of the biggest early names in smart home devices, and I've got a ton of their bulbs scattered around my home. They might be expensive, but they work, they're color-accurate, and I haven't had to replace one since I got them years ago. But while they're Zigbee-compatible, they needed a proprietary kit to work together, the Philips Hue Bridge.

What really irritates me about the hub isn't that I need it, but that it only connects to one of the smart home protocols at a time. I can have it work with Alexa, or Matter, or HomeKit, but not all three, and this has led to some weird behavior between the mix of smartphones and smart speakers my family uses. Oh, and the Bridge usually needs you to log into the Philips cloud; otherwise, it only has basic functionality. No, thanks.

But with Zigbee and Home Assistant, I've managed to ditch the Philips Hue Bridge, ditch the limitation on ecosystem, and connect to my bulbs locally, without needing the cloud for control. I'm honestly not sure if local control has moods and all the extras that the Hue Bridge enabled, but I never used those features anyway, and my lights are only ever cycled between two settings and various brightness levels. I know I could keep the Bridge and use a local REST API, but I also want to clear a port on my router, so the Bridge has got to go.

Smart switches

I shouldn't be unable to use my sockets if the internet goes down

Smart plugs are one of the most useful smart home devices, letting you add smarts to dumb appliances, track energy use, and perform other handy features. It's not hard to find Zigbee-only smart plugs now, and connect them to Home Assistant directly, but some brands are a little trickier. TP-Link makes you initialize each smart plug via the cloud, but once that step is over, you can block them from communicating with TP-Link's servers, and control them locally from HA with the integration.

There's also the python-kasa library, which enables local control without needing cloud initialization, but my Python skills are rusty at best and will be a future project. For now, I'm just happy that my smart plugs aren't able to send data outside my smart home, because WHY DO THEY NEED TO?

Robot vacuum

Why do I need the cloud to clear my floors?

I've got a small fleet of robot vacuums in my home, because I've found that outsourcing chores wherever possible is the best balm for my sanity. I've managed to bring most of them into Home Assistant, and now no longer need to worry about external API calls or if the cloud servers are available. The compatibility for my Roborock units is better, with an official integration that allows local control but with a reduced feature set. I guess that's the price to pay for privacy, but it's one that I'll gladly make the trade-off on.

I'm trying to reduce my reliance on the cloud, but some companies don't make it easy

That's not to say I've managed to integrate everything that I've tried. Some of my robot vacuums don't have their API figured out yet. Google's Nest Thermostat range has a hit-or-miss track record for which ones work without the cloud (spoiler: the one I own doesn't), and that's a similar story with many devices that are compatible with Google Home or Amazon Alexa.

HomeKit is surprisingly easy, and I've managed to remove every one of those devices from Apple Home and connect them to Home Assistant, which also works as a HomeKit Hub. Same with the already Matter-compatible devices — it took minutes to set HA up as a Matter controller and connect things. It just shows that you can have a private, locally-controlled smart home — if the companies making the devices get on board. I'll be voting with my wallet for new smart home additions, and if they don't have local control, I won't be picking them up.