FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Open-Source “Voice Preview Edition” Becomes First Voice-First Home Assistant to Offer Native, Cross-Brand Matter Control
Home Assistant ships a fully open hardware-and-software voice hub that pairs local speech processing with the industry-backed Matter protocol, letting consumers command 3,200+ smart-home devices without cloud lock-in.
San Francisco, Calif. – November 20, 2025 – Home Assistant, the world’s largest open-source smart-home platform, today announced general availability of Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, a $59 voice-first hub that natively controls any Matter-certified device regardless of brand or ecosystem. The launch arrives as analysts forecast the global voice-assistant market will more than quintuple from US$ 4.7 billion in 2024 to US$ 14.8 billion by 2033 .
Unlike closed assistants from Amazon, Apple or Google, the Voice Preview Edition processes commands locally on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, stores data on the user’s own Home Assistant server, and communicates with lights, locks, thermostats and sensors over standard IPv6 and Thread radios baked into Matter. Early benchmarks show 92 percent of basic smart-home intents—“Set bedroom lights to 30 percent” or “Lock the front door”—are executed in under 400 milliseconds, even with the internet disconnected.
“Consumers are tired of buying one brand of hub for Alexa, another for Google, and a bridge just to make their switches work,” said Paulus Schoutsen, founder and project lead of Home Assistant. “Matter promised interoperability; we’re delivering it with an assistant that you can audit, modify and host yourself. Voice Preview Edition is the first hub that treats Matter as the default, not an after-thought.”
Matter adoption is accelerating: more than 1,200 products from 280 manufacturers are now certified, and shipments of Matter devices are projected to exceed 350 million units in 2026, according to the Connectivity Standards Alliance. Home Assistant acts as a Matter controller, meaning it can commission, group and script devices from Nanoleaf, Eve, Aqara, Philips Hue, Samsung SmartThings, Google Nest and Amazon Echo without additional bridges . Users can mix Thread-based motion sensors with Wi-Fi plugs in the same automation routine, then trigger it by saying “Movie time.”
Privacy controls are hardware-enforced. A physical dip-switch disables the six on-board microphones; voice processing is handled by the open-source Wyoming protocol, allowing owners to swap in their own STT or TTS engines. Because no audio leaves the local network, the device bypasses the 41 percent of U.S. consumers who cite “always-listening fears” as the top barrier to smart-speaker adoption .
Market analysts say the timing is ideal. Household penetration of voice assistants in North America has reached 153.5 million users, yet only one in five smart-home owners actually connects devices from two or more brands—evidence that ecosystem lock-in still suppresses demand . By open-sourcing both the firmware and the 3-D printable enclosure files, Home Assistant is positioning its hub as the “Raspberry Pi of voice,” a low-cost board that hobbyists and OEMs alike can white-label.
The Voice Preview Edition is available today from the Home Assistant store and global distributors including Seeed and Adafruit. A software update scheduled for Q1 2026 will add multi-admin support, letting users share a single Matter fabric with Apple Home or Google Home while retaining local Home Assistant automations.
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