7 more Home Assistant features I wish I'd started using sooner

Published Oct 24, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. The number of features packed into Home Assistant is insane. The problem is that there are so many features that it can be easy to overlook some of the best ones. I slept on some of Home Assistant's features for far too long; here are some more of the best features that I wish I'd started using much sooner. Actionable notifications Controlling my smart home from a notification on my phone I knew about actionable notifications for a long time before I ever started using them. I wish I'd started sooner, because now I use them every single day. A standard notification from Home Assistant pops up on your phone to provide you with some information, and that's as far as it goes. An actionable notification includes a set of actions that you can select directly from the notification itself to make something happen in Home Assistant. A simple example would be a notification that tells you that the living room light is on when you go to bed, with options to turn it off or leave it on. You can then choose your option and control the light without having to open up a Home Assistant dashboard or use a voice command. I use a complicated series of actionable notifications to nag me to take my medication every day. Bayesian sensors Multiple signals and some math make automations more reliable There are multiple clues from your smart home that might tell you someone is home. The lights may be on, the TV may be playing a movie, a phone may be detected in the home zone, the heating may be turned up, and so on. The problem is that none of those things guarantee that someone is home, so you can't build a reliable presence-based automation based on any one of those signals alone. A Bayesian sensor allows you to combine multiple signals to calculate the probability of something being true. The lights might be on during the day a lot even when no one is home, while the TV may rarely be left on if no one is there to watch it. A Bayesian sensor uses math to take multiple events and their likelihoods and work out a probability, such as the probability that someone is at home, based on those signals. It can be a far more accurate way to trigger automations. Combine multiple AV devices into one A smart TV can do a lot, but the chances are that you have additional devices as part of your AV setup. Depending on what I'm watching, I may have a set-top box, a streaming stick, a surround sound system, and more involved. The Universal Media Player integration lets you combine multiple media player entities into a single virtual media device. You can set it up to use specific devices depending on which ones are in use. For example, if your surround sound system is on, the volume controls can change the surround sound receiver volume, but if the surround sound is off, the same controls change the TV volume instead. Instead of having to control different devices independently, the Universal Media Player integration can handle them all together. It can make complicated AV setups far easier to use. Automation modes The default behavior isn't always what you want By default, Home Assistant automations run once and ignore any new triggers while the current run is ongoing. This is only one of four possible automation modes, however. Restart will stop the existing run and start a new one if an automation is triggered again in the middle of a run. If you trigger an automation while it's still running, Queued will wait until the current run has finished and then start the next run. Parallel will start an entire run alongside the original run. These modes can be really useful in different circumstances. For example, if you have an automation for motion-activated lighting that uses a delay, using Restart will reset the delay timer each time the automation is triggered. The Proximity integration Know if someone is heading home Using geolocation, Home Assistant can turn off your heating when you're away, so that you're not heating an empty home. The problem is that if your heating only comes back on when you re-enter your Home zone, you may walk into a cold house. The Proximity integration can solve this problem. It can determine whether you're moving towards or away from your home based on how your location changes and can even tell how far away you are from a specific zone. You can use this information to get your home to warm up when you're detected as returning home, but still far enough away that your home has time to get warm. Duration-based triggers I slept on the fairly recent update You've been able to trigger an automation based on how long an entity has been in a specific state for a long time in Home Assistant. For example, if you wanted to send a notification once a window had been open for more than half an hour, you could use a state duration in the automation that would stop the notification from sending until the set duration had elapsed. These duration options weren't available for every trigger or condition, however. In the Home Assistant 2026.5 update, support for duration-based triggers was added to some of the useful purpose-specific triggers. For example, you can now run an automation when motion hasn't been detected for 10 minutes using a motion cleared trigger with a duration of 10 minutes. Reusable scripts Don't reinvent the wheel in every automation It took me a long time to realize that I was using the same sets of actions in automations over and over again. For example, I would have an action to send a notification to my phone, and another one to send a notification to my wife's phone, and another to send the notification to the TV if it was on, and another to speak the notification aloud if I was in my home office, and these same actions appeared in many different automations. I finally got around to combining these actions into a single script. Now for any automation where I want to send notifications, I just run the script with the appropriate message passed to it. The best part is that if I get a new phone, I'll only need to update it in a single script instead of having to manually edit a ton of automations. There are still more great features to uncover It amazes me the amount of stuff that gets added in each new Home Assistant update. New and better features are added every month, along with new integrations or updates to existing ones. Even if you've been using Home Assistant for years, it's worth taking a look to see which great features you've been sleeping on.