in today's video we're going to be having a look at five new features that I really
like in home assistant's first release of the year the 2023.1 update check it out [Music]
what's going on guys I hope you're all doing well 2023 is finally here and with the new year brings
a brand new home assistant and a brand new Focus this year home assistant is focusing on the year
of the voice so expect lots of new voice things to appear throughout the year with this update being
the first of the year it's a much smaller one as the developers were on holiday and lots of the
community were also out enjoying their holidays but even though it was a smaller one we still
got some brand new features and there were still over 800 git commits let's dive straight into it
then with my first new feature and this one is voice assistant aliasers you can now add entity
aliases for all of your home assistant entities and what this allows you to do is to give the
device a kind of nickname or a common name or maybe a preferred name that you'd actually like
to call the device so when you're talking to your voice assistant you can call it by this
additional name or Alias currently this feature is just limited to the Google Assistant it's not
something that I think that Amazon an echo will ever support but who knows maybe Amazon will make
some changes and this feature will probably also come to whatever home assistant voice
assistant comes out probably an updated version of raspy creating an alias is super simple you just
select your entity and choose settings and from here you can scroll down to Advanced and you'll
see this new feature for adding an alias from here you simply just type in what you want the
Alias to be and you can add as many as you want and that will then just sync with your Google
assistant and you'll be able to start talking to the device using that newly set Alias carrying
on with my second feature we've got a brand new integration for Rio link so there's now a brand
new real link integration that comes as part of the standard home assistant installation so you
no longer need to use a hacks variant unless you want to make use of some of the extra features
that are currently in the hacks version but you can just directly add this real link integration
by choosing add integration and then selecting real link currently this new integration is
missing some of the features that are available in some of the other hacks versions but this is
one that is going to be actively maintained and developed and it will just continue updating with
home assistant which is always nice to see the integration seems to work quite well and it's
worked with the cameras that I've tested on it there are plans to add some of those missing
features and they will probably just appear over the next few updates so if you didn't like using
hacks or you're against using it or maybe you don't like adding that on the feed or any of
the other ways that you can add those cameras it's now an official way to actually do this natively
so maybe go and check that one out as with the trend of last year we've had some new Bluetooth
updates and enhancements making Bluetooth just that little bit better we've also gained some
new product support so we now have support for the power monitor of wall plugs for switchbot products
there's also been some initial support for the switchbot dehumidifier and the lock that switchbot
have recently brought out is now also supported and it works really well and really quickly
up next we've got my fourth feature and this one is calendars in the last update of the year
we got a brand new local calendar and this feature was one that was heavily requested
by the community and we finally got it towards the end of the year this allowed you to create
different calendars and different events and then you could run automations and triggers
based on these different local calendars and the best thing about it was the fact that it was all
local all of those features that were created and added for local calendars are now all available in
the Google Calendar so if you're a Google Calendar user you can now do all those different things and
you can now directly create Google calendar events straight in your home assistant as well as Google
Calendars getting some fancy new updates the local calendar also got some new features so we're now
able to edit existing calendar events using the local calendar and we also got some brand new
monthly variations so you can now set up monthly occurring events and monthly occurring schedules
that you want your home assistant to react to or just to be able to visualize in home assistant
my fifth and final feature of this update is mata mata is slowly starting to just pop up everywhere
and if you've been watching CES 2023 then you'll have definitely noticed that Mata is the key word
of this year in the last update we've got the first official rollout of Mata for home assistant
and although this is still currently a developer build and it's not very stable just yet it is
still available and it is still there in this update there's now a way to actually commission
and provision your Mata devices directly into home assistant using an Android app again this is still
beta and still very developery but if you do have an Android device and you're wanting to test this
out and you actually have some Mata devices that you can actually get your hands on then you can
actually go and test this out although that matter buzzword is popping up everywhere Mata
devices still aren't widely available and it's still quite hard and limited to actually get a
device that is specifically matter based but over the course of this year I imagine we will start
seeing these things being widely available and matter supported and there we go guys that's been
five new features that I really like in our first update of the year if you have enjoyed this video
then don't forget to drop me a like and if you're not already hit that subscribe button and ding
dong that notification Bell you'll then be alerted to any future video that I do as always massive
thank you to these awesome dudes these awesome dudes are my patrons and if you're interested in
helping support my channel which in turn allows me to create content like this you'll find a link to
my patreon in the description below thank you for watching and I'll catch you in the next one cheers