Home Assistant 2026.4 Just Got Smarter | Area Automations & IR Control

Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel, Home Assistant 2026.4 beta is here,

and this one has a feature that could

generally change how we think about smart homes.

We're talking about controlling your TV, your air conditioner, your soundbar,

or from Home Assistant without replacing a single device.

Plus, smarter automations, dashboard upgrades, and a lot more.

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Okay, let's dive in.

Okay, here we go. One of the new things in

this release is that it now supports infrared,

and you can buy a device for it. For instance, this one, the Xiao Smart IR Mate,

which is an infrared sending device. And in Home Assistant, there is now already

one integration that can use it. I don't

have the device yet, so it's not working here,

but I can show a little bit about it. So I go to settings, devices and services,

and then let's say add integration, and

there's the LG. And if I go to LG, there is now an LG

infrared. So you can connect this device to this

integration, and then you can control your LG TV.

On the ESP Home page right here, there's a

ready-made projects page. There you can use this infrared

proxy option, select the device, connect it, and

then you can flash that device to make it work.

The great thing about it is that you can use

this device in multiple places in your house,

so you can control multiple TVs, air

conditioners, etc. in your house. It's a really cool feature.

The next thing is purpose-specific

automation triggers and conditions, and there has been

something new added to it, and that's the great

thing about it, is that you can now control your

devices using a more human-friendly approach. So

if I go to settings, okay, close, go to settings,

automation and scenes, and I create a new

automation, create new automation, adding a trigger.

So for instance, I'll use the trigger, let's

say motion. What I can now do is motion detect it,

and I can now choose for a target, for

instance, areas and labels. So I can now say,

if motion has been detected, let's say in

the office, and now you see that there are five

entities that it will recognize if there is

motion detected. So you don't really have to

select entities now anymore. You can now just say

for a certain area or for a certain label. So that

is really cool. It's not only for motion, it's

for more things. For instance, let me see triggers.

Let's say temperature, press temperature,

here's temperature. So let's say if the temperature

crosses a certain threshold, I can also add a

target here. Let's say area. Let's say in the,

well, maybe also.

There's also a lot of new triggers added. So let's just close this one.

So for instance, I'll take battery. Now you see here, if battery level changed,

battery level crossed threshold, battery low, battery

not low, battery start charging, battery stop charging.

For doors, we have now door closed, door opened.

For garage doors, we also have garage door closed,

garage door opened, for illuminance we have illuminance changed,

illuminance crossed threshold, light cleared,

light detected, etc, etc. So there's a lot of

new triggers added and that means that this

new interface is getting pretty finished already.

So I guess that in just a couple of new releases,

this new interface will be the new interface for

automations in Home Assistant. For now, it's only

available through LABS. So if you don't see this,

then you have to activate it by going to

settings. Oh, don't save. Go to settings, then go to

systems, system, go to labs and here you can

activate the purpose specific triggers and conditions.

Now another thing that people wanted to see

is the following. Let's go to tutorial, go to

2026.4. Let's edit this. Is that I can now add a background color to my section.

Yay! So let's add for instance a clock here.

Clock. Let's make the clock analog. No background.

So display seconds. So now I have a clock here

and now I want to change the background of this

section. I go to the pencil over here. I can

now enable the background. I can choose a color,

for instance lime. I can change the opacity of

that background, save it and now I have a background

color for my section, which is nice if you

want to make it more colorful dashboards.

Now the next thing is something that might

change your interface a lot and that is the new naming

convention for entities and this is a backward

incompatible change. So what has been done is if

I go for instance to settings and I go to

devices and services. Let's choose for an entity.

Oh, there's motion. I have a whole upstairs

motion sensor. That's this one for instance.

Now you see I gave it the name occupancy and

if I now go to let's say my tutorial dashboards,

edit it. Let's add a tile card.

Oh, there's

motion sensor. Not sure which occupancy here it is. Then what you now see here,

and let's make it a little bit wider. Let's say it's full white.

Now you see that the name that it shows is

whole upstairs motion sensor occupancy. So if I save

it, you see that it's quite a large name. I

can change that name if I go to content again,

for instance, remove device and then it

only says says occupancy. So add device again,

put it to the left and this means that all your entities that you renamed manually

might get a new name now. So it might have impact

on how your dashboard looks. This might be quite

annoying to change. It is backwards

incompatible. So you might have a problem here. Go to your

dashboard and see if you have this issue. You

might wonder what this will do for voice if you

use voice in Home Assistant. Well, if you

upgrade to 2026.4, a migration is done automatically.

That will use these names that you gave it

manually as aliases. So let me give you an

example. I'll go to, let's cancel this. Go to settings, devices and services.

An entity here is, I have one dinner table. This one.

So I gave this entity the name dinner table

like here manually before, but if I open this

in a tile card, it will show Shelley dimmer

to underscore and then this ID dinner table.

If I now go to the voice assistants, then you

see the aliases and you see the alias for Shelley

dimmer to dash ID dinner table is dinner table.

So this alias has been added during the migration

to Home Assistant 2026.4. This makes sure

that your voice commands will continue working

after you update to 2026.4. Then if you own a

lock, which supports matter, then there's a new

functionality added to add users to that lock

in Home Assistant. Now the thing is I do have a

matter lock. So let's open it just to show

you. Let's go to matter. Then I have ultra.

Where is it? Switchbot ultra. Where is it? Where is it? Lock ultra.

Then there should be an interface here where I can

add users. The thing is that it, for some reason,

it doesn't work for my Switchbot lock ultra

yet, but I can show it in the release notes. So I'll

do that. And what you see here is this is a matter

lock and there is an option here manage lock. And

if you go to manage lock, then you can add

users and pin codes and give them full access or one

time access. For some reason, it's not working

for my Switchbot lock ultra yet. I suppose there

will be an update shortly that it will work,

but for now it's not working yet. And then another

thing which is also very nice. Let me go to

tutorial here. Let's edit this. Well, let me

just create a new section. I'm going to add a

tile card. The tile card. I'm going to add a light

light dot office back left, for instance.

Then you see the office back left tile card here.

Now I can add features to that. If I add the

feature, there was already feature light brightness,

light color temperature, but now there's also

light color favorites, which is really cool.

Let's save it. I can do the same for instance for here's the tile cards. Let's say

cover office cover left. Also add a feature add

feature cover favorite positions save. And now

you see here zero, 25%, 75% and 100%, which is

quite nice. But what if you define favorites for

one entity and you want to copy it to another

entity, for instance, you have two lights and

you want the same favorites for that light. I know

you can also create groups and you can also create

scenes, but let's say for this use case, I have two

lights and I want the same favorites. Then you can

open the light, click on the three dots here,

click on copy favorites too, and then select

the other entity that you want it for. For instance, office back right.

Copy. And now I have the same favorites for my

office back right. Pretty nice. Another dashboard

card that has had some changes is, let me show you here is the Gauge card.

Let's get another card. Office temperature, office front temperature.

It looks a little bit more nice. I can also

do a needle gauge. I can define the severity.

For instance, green is to let's say 10. Yellow is 15. Red is 30. Just oh.

So this one also looks a little bit nicer than it was before.

Next to that, something else is added. For

instance, if I take, let's say a vertical stack.

Vertical stack cards. There is now an

option in the layout that is called auto height.

Auto height. That means that the vertical

stack card is automatically gets automatically

height based on its content. So if I say for

instance, let's add a light and let's add a dark card.

Weird.

This. I save it. Now I can set this to

added layout auto height or not auto height.

And you see if I do not set it to auto height,

things do not look very nice. Now let's go back and set it to auto height.

Then it automatically adapts to what is shown in the vertical stack cards.

So these were the main changes that I

wanted to show you. There are also integrations,

of course. New integrations. Let's see. Autoskope, Casper Glow, Chess.com,

Dropbox. Oh, that's nice. Use your Dropbox account as a backup location

for home assistant backups. That is also so if you use Dropbox, now you can

back up your home assistant into Dropbox. Let's see what do we have here.

Oh, that's infrared. That's the thing that