Hey, here I am again, and this time with all the new features in the Home Assistant April 2025.4 release. I’m super excited about what’s included in this update! I’ll talk about new variable scopes in automations and scripts, the new Areas dashboard, the clock card, amazing voice expansions, backups, and much more. Let’s dive right in!

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First, I want to mention that this video is based on the beta version of the 2025.4 release, so the final release may contain a few minor changes. Usually, these differences are minimal. The final release is scheduled for the first Wednesday of April, but you can install the beta version if you want to try out the new features now.

During our content creators’ meeting, I was excited about the new additions to Home Assistant. Once again, the team has delivered a fantastic release!

Areas Dashboard

Yessss, it’s finally here! You can now automatically generate your dashboard—at least the first step has been taken. If you’ve assigned your devices and entities to the correct areas, you can now generate a dashboard that displays all relevant devices and entities per area. This will be a massive help for people starting with Home Assistant, making it much easier to build a dashboard quickly. And the best part? Your dashboard is automatically updated when you add new entities to your areas!

You can make areas visible or hidden and change their order. If you’ve set them up for that specific area, temperature and humidity are displayed for each area.

You can also make entities visible or hidden and rearrange them. Most entities are displayed using tile cards, but for cameras, for example, the camera feed is shown directly.

Once you’ve set up the basics, you can customize the dashboard. The team has mentioned that more updates are coming, so this feature is still considered experimental.

New Clock Card

This must be 2025’s killer feature. The new clock card is here and shows… well… the time!

Improved Voice Wizard

A new voice wizard has been added, which appears when you set up a Home Assistant Voice Assistant-compatible device. This makes it easier to configure your voice device, such as the Voice PE, correctly in one go.

Continued conversation with LLMs

This is another excellent system enhancement! In the past, you had to use the wake word for every question you asked your voice assistant. But starting with the 2025.4 release, that’s no longer necessary. Once the LLM responds, you can continue the conversation without repeating the wake word.

Starting Conversations

You can now not only continue a conversation, but Home Assistant can also initiate one, allowing you to respond and quickly trigger an automation, for example. Your system can now detect if you forgot to lock your door and, upon noticing it, send a notification informing you that the door is unlocked and asking if you want to lock it. You only need to reply with “yes” or “no,” and the door will be locked.

This feature only works if you’re using an LLM.

I’ll create a more in-depth tutorial on this later.

Pre-Announce Sound

Now that we can let Home Assistant start a conversation, it would be great if there was a pre-announce sound that we can configure ourselves. And yes, we can do that. Just upload an audio file to your /www folder; you can use that as the pre-announce sound for a conversation.

Restoring Backup from Home Assistant Cloud during onboarding

And yet another excellent new feature. When you need to install Home Assistant from scratch because something went wrong in your system, you can now immediately restore a backup from Home Assistant cloud during the onboarding process.

New Integration

Of course, this release also includes several new integrations and updates to existing ones. You can find them in this list; the link is also available in the description of this video. Significant changes have been made to the SmartThings integration, and the Reolink integration has also been further expanded.

Other Noteworthy Changes

In addition to the changes I’ve shown you, you can find more updates on this list. One of the most important is adjusting the scope of variables in automations and scripts.

Automation & Script variable scopes

For users who create more advanced automations and scripts with variables, this change may impact your existing automations and scripts. Previously, variables were only available within the automation section where they were declared.

Starting with the upcoming release, variables will be declared globally within the automation or script, allowing them to be accessed throughout the entire automation or script.

Here’s an example:

actions:
  - variables:
      x: 1
      y: 1
  - sequence:
    - variables:
        y: 2  # Updates y which exists in the outer scope
        z: 2  # Since z is not defined yet, it is assigned in the top-level scope
  - action: persistent_notification.create
    data:
      message: "{{ x }}, {{ y }}, {{ z }}" # x=1, y=2, z=2
      # Note: previously it would be: x=1, y=1, z undefined

So, if you have declared variables with the same name in multiple parts of the same automation, the automation may produce unexpected results.

Templates

Additionally, new functions for templates have been added, as you can see in the list. These are especially useful for advanced users who love working with templates!

Last but not least, you can now create a hierarchy for energy management devices. For each device, you can specify whether it is part of a larger system.

This is ideal if a breaker monitors the energy consumption of an entire circuit while also tracking individual devices within that circuit.

So, these are the new features coming in the Home Assistant April 2025.4 release! This update goes live on the first Wednesday of April, and I’m curious to hear what you think. Let me know in the comments what your favorite new feature is! It’s hard to choose, but I think the voice expansions are my favorite.

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Bye-bye!