What Can Home Assistant's Assist Do?

Assist can handle basic tasks like controlling lights and adjusting brightness. You can also ask it questions related to entities integrated with Home Assistant, such as the status of a sensor. However, keep in mind that Assist is not designed to replace tools like the Google Assistant. It won't be able to tell you the capital of a country or what sound a cow makes.

My initial thoughts on Assist (or Assistant, as the window name suggests) are that it's intriguing to see where Home Assistant is headed, but it’s not yet ready to replace the Dashboard. Currently, the conversation flow is quite slow, and it takes a bit of time for commands to be executed.

Excited About Voice Control? Get Your Aliases Ready!

If you’re excited about voice control, now is a good time to set up aliases for your entities. Aliases help Home Assistant understand what you’re referring to and can be configured in the entities' settings. New in this update are aliases for areas, which are set up in the same way. Ensuring that all your devices have appropriate aliases will make voice control much smoother.

Integrating Assist with OpenAI

A new Home Assistant integration allows you to use the power of OpenAI's GPT-3 as a conversation agent. While the performance is significantly improved, there is a major downside: it can only answer questions about your smart home and cannot execute commands. Additionally, Home Assistant will need to share details of your setup with a third party, as this integration cannot be run locally.

Keep an Eye Out for the Year of the Voice Stream

Currently, there isn't much more information available, but later today there is a stream scheduled that will hopefully provide more details.