Home Assistant released the 2026.6 beta this week, introducing key user experience (UX) improvements. Beyond adding broader Matter device support, this release brings adjustments to the overall user experience, spanning from dashboard configuration to automation logic.
Here is a breakdown of the monthly update.
Matter expansions and network reliability
Home Assistant Green
A compact, fanless Home Assistant hub with quad-core processing, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, local data control and Thread USB expandability.
The push to make Matter a foundational component in Home Assistant continues. The Matter integration officially adds platform support for sirens. It introduces native siren entity support by mapping vendor specific Matter integer attributes to standard On/Off commands. Tested with the Heiman HS1SA-M smoke detector, it reads the active siren attribute and processes it through standard state commands. For users building a local security system, it is now possible to natively trigger and control Matter enabled sirens directly from dashboards.
The community also resolved a state synchronization issue for bridged Matter devices. Previously, the Matter integration failed to process the “Reachable” attribute from basic device information clusters. This meant devices connected via third party Matter bridges could drop offline, but Home Assistant would ignore the status and incorrectly report them as available.
Home Assistant now officially announced the features for simpler Matter onboarding with BLE proxies. Powered by a recent update to the Python client for Matter, this changes the commissioning process. Instead of managing extra hardware and passthrough rules on virtual environments, users can utilize ESP32 dev boards or Shelly relays to commission new Matter devices everywhere within the BLE coverage.
Build dashboard and automation faster
Dashboard configuration is now more intuitive. When adding a new card, the dialog opens on a “By entity” tab. The left sidebar displays a structured tree of floors, areas, devices and entities. This layout closely resembles the purpose specific triggers recently introduced in the experimental settings. If a device does not belong to a specific room, it drops into an “Unassigned” category. This updated flow now supports lights, covers, media players, numeric sensors, calendars, to-do lists and a “Browse all cards” option.
One of the power features in Home Assistant is batch controls for targeting entire areas or custom tags. The automation creator now makes this targeting logic transparent. Every floor, area, device and label pill in the automation rows displays the exact number of entities it expands to right next to its name. Restricting the target selector with a specific domain or device class filter causes the pill count to dynamically update.
You can see the exact number of devices an action will affect before saving the configuration.
Make your TV remotes smart with two-way IR
For setups relying on infrared blasters, the new two-way IR control represents a functional update. Infrared has historically been a one way protocol, meaning smart home platforms rarely knew if a physical device was actually turned on. Home Assistant can now maintain state synchronization with original physical remotes. When a user operates the manufacturer remote to activate a television or adjust the air conditioning, Home Assistant detects the action and updates the backend state.
This feature also allows an unused IR remote to function as a universal Home Assistant controller. A secondary remote can be mapped to trigger scenes, execute scripts or control unrelated smart devices across the local network. This seamlessly bridges old appliances into the smart ecosystem, and hopefully exposed to Matter via an Add-on. The feature should now work with ESPHome devices that build with IR components as the change log noted.
Check the full log of Home Assistant 2026.6, and provide feedback to the developers through official channels including Home Assistant forum and Discord.
(Source: Home Assistant; Image: Matter Alpha/Ward Zhou)
