A home butler for Home Assistant. You talk to it, it watches over your home, and it learns how you live.
Nova is a custom integration for Home Assistant. You install it through HACS and it runs inside Home Assistant. There is no extra server, and you don't need a Nova account.
You can talk to Nova by voice or text. Ask it to turn on a light, lock the door or tell you what is open. Ask about your calendar or your solar panels. Once you turn on web research, ask about something on the web too. It also keeps an eye on the house in the background. It tells you about a door left open, a leak or someone at the front door, and it suggests automations based on your routines.
You don't need cameras or voice hardware to start. All you need is Home Assistant and an AI to think with: either a cloud key (Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini) or a local Ollama server. Cameras, speakers and more can be added whenever you like.
Nova can control your home when you ask. What it won't do on its own is take big steps without you.
- It never installs a suggested automation until you approve it.
- It can't unlock a door, open a garage or disarm the alarm by voice alone. Those need a tap on your phone.
- It tells you what it knows. "The lock is locked" means Nova checked. "I sent the command" means it hasn't confirmed yet.
- Before it locks, closes or arms anything, it reads the device again. If it can't read the device, it says so and sends nothing. Arming the alarm with a door or window open asks you first.
- At night, everyday alerts are dropped rather than queued. High alerts go to your phone, and critical ones always speak.
- If a device name is unclear, it asks which one you mean instead of guessing.
- Smoke, carbon monoxide, water leak and confirmed intrusion alerts can't be muted.
- Home Assistant 2024.10.0 or newer, with HACS installed.
- An AI for Nova to use. Pick one: a key from Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini, or the address of a local Ollama server.
Everything else is optional. Cameras are covered in Camera setup. On Home Assistant OS or Supervised, Nova can set up the voice add-ons (Piper, Whisper and openWakeWord) for you: turn on "Install voice add-ons" in Settings → Anticipation & Memory. On Container or Core installs you add them yourself. What Nova includes lists every core and optional feature.
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Add the repository to HACS. Click the button below, or open HACS, choose the three dots, then Custom repositories, and add
https://github.com/abz2much/NOVAas an Integration. -
Install "Nova AI Assistant" from HACS and restart Home Assistant.
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Go to Settings, Devices & Services, Add Integration, and choose Nova. Enter a key for each cloud provider you use, your Ollama address, or both. Then pick a provider and model for each job. Nova suggests sensible choices and tests each one. Keys are saved in
secrets.yaml, not in plain settings. -
Nova appears in your sidebar. A one time "Nova is ready" notification lists anything that still needs attention.
If you had an older Nova config.json, Nova imports it and skips the setup screens.
After every update, refresh the panel with Ctrl+Shift+R (Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac). Your browser caches the dashboard, and the old version can linger.
Open the Nova panel in the sidebar, or talk to Nova through your Assist pipeline. Try:
- "Turn off the lights in the kitchen."
- "What's open in the house?"
- "What's on my calendar tomorrow?"
- "What's the latest news on the Mars mission?" (needs web research, which is off until you choose DuckDuckGo or SearXNG)
Nova's settings live in two places. Day to day settings (AI models, cameras, safety, language) are in the Nova panel under Settings. Routing settings such as which phone to notify, quiet hours and credentials are under Settings, Devices & Services, Nova, Configure. Getting started has a tour of the panel.
| You want to | What Nova does | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Talk to your home | Voice and text conversation, with a calm, dry personality you can turn up or down | Voice and speakers |
| Type to Nova from the panel | The Chat tab gives each person their own thread. Unlocking, opening and disarming from there need a tap on your phone | Safety and security |
| See the house at a glance | The Command Center shows Nova's core inside turning rings that change with its mood, live cards round it (security, who is home, energy, indoor, weather), Nova's latest line, and pop-up cards that settle into place | Getting started |
| Run things with your own words | "Nova, the house is cold" runs the script, automation or scene you link to it. Works offline, with the usual safety checks | Voice phrases |
| Keep the home safe | Watches for intrusion, smoke, carbon monoxide, leaks, freezing pipes, and doors or windows left open. Can lock up at night. While your alarm is armed away it trusts the alarm, so a sensor still on from you leaving never reads as an intruder. Reads your own labels (Appliance, Entry Point, Group) instead of guessing from names. When the alarm goes off it tells you which sensor tripped and what the camera there sees | Safety and security |
| Check the house is secure | Ask "is the house secure?" and Nova lists what is open, unlocked, disarmed or offline, most serious first. It only looks, it never changes anything | Safety and security |
| Know who comes to the door | Analyses doorbell presses and learns regular visitors. Package Watch and face recognition (Frigate or Double Take) are off until you turn them on. It describes your own property, not the road or the neighbours, and stops its own camera analyses at a daily limit (300 by default) | Cameras and faces |
| Stop being nagged at the wrong time | Knows who is home, who is asleep and when quiet hours are, and speaks to the right person in the right room | Presence and alerts |
| Save effort | Suggests automations from your habits and gives morning and evening briefings once you pick a time. Departure alerts, which tell you when to leave for appointments, are off until you turn them on | Routines and suggestions |
| Understand your energy | Shows solar, battery and grid in one place, today's totals and a 36 hour outlook with advice. You pick the sensor for your home's total power use, so a wrong guess never shows 0 W all night | Energy |
| Remember things | Keeps facts you tell it, answers from your manuals and receipts, and can read your email (read only) | Memory and knowledge |
| Use Nova's own speech to text, and know who is speaking | Nova Voice ID passes your speech to Whisper and can tell who is speaking (a hint, never a key). Voice data stays on your own machine. Needs the Nova Voice ID app. | Voice ID |
| Hear about bad weather | Weather warnings from Met Éireann, the US National Weather Service or a CAP feed | Weather warnings |
| Find out why something broke | Checks your setup for problems and explains what it found, with fixes you apply yourself | Getting started |
| Use the panel with a keyboard or screen reader | Every button and field says what it is and whether it is on, panel titles are headings, focus stays where you were after a save, and a visible ring shows where you are | Getting started |
| Draw the house on a phone, a tablet or by keyboard | The floor plan editor works with a finger or a pen: drag with one finger, pinch to zoom, move two fingers to pan. Or pick an item and move, resize or delete it with buttons or the arrow keys, no dragging needed | Getting started |
| See what Nova did, in plain words | A bar at the bottom of the Command Center opens Nova, Areas, Goals and More in panels that slide up. Nova's panel lists what it told you, sent to your phone or kept quiet about in plain sentences written without AI calls, with a box to ask Nova a question | Getting started |
| Choose the panel's colours | Pick one of Oriel's twelve themes in Settings: six dark (Deep Teal, Midnight Signal, Plum Dusk, Cocoa Bark, Forest Mint, Slate Harbour) and six light (Classic, Violet Mist, Berry Sky, Quantum Ice, Pine Mist, Ember). Cards are frosted glass with neutral text, and the theme colour marks only what matters. Every theme keeps text easy to read | Settings reference |
Nova also shows its reasoning. The Logs tab lists every decision it made, why, and how confident it was. You can tell it when a decision was helpful or unnecessary.
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| What Nova did, in plain words, and a box to ask it. | Twelve colour themes, dark and light, picked in Settings. |
Nova adds entities to its Nova device, so any dashboard can show what it is doing.
| Entity | Shows |
|---|---|
| Status | ready, quiet, napping, lockdown or observer off |
| Quiet | on while anything is shushed, with what is muted and until when |
| Nap ends | when the current nap ends |
| Lockdown | on while lockdown is active |
| Last announcement | when Nova last spoke, and what it said |
| Next reminder | how many reminders are due in the next 24 hours, and the first five |
| Briefing | when the latest briefing ran, and its text |
| Camera summary | the latest camera summary and the last five |
| Energy note | one sentence on today's energy use against the same time yesterday |
| Suggestions | how many automation suggestions are waiting, and the first ten |
Services for dashboard buttons: nova.shush takes minutes to lift itself later, and nova.suggestion_accept and nova.suggestion_dismiss act on a suggestion by its id (admin users only).
You can use a cloud AI, a local one, or both. Each of Nova's jobs (conversation, reasoning, camera analysis and so on) can use a different one.
- Cloud (Groq, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini) is the easiest start. Your requests go to that provider, and you pay their normal usage rates.
- Local (Ollama) keeps everything on your own network and costs nothing per request, but needs a computer with a decent graphics card.
- Offline is covered too. If the internet drops, Nova keeps handling routine events and simple commands such as "turn on the lamp" or "lock the door" on its own.
You can change providers any time under Settings, AI Models. See Getting started.
Everything Nova learns and stores stays in your Home Assistant, mostly in the nova/ folder of your config directory. Nova has no cloud service and no telemetry. It never sends anything on its own.
Data leaves your network only when you turn on a feature that needs it:
- The AI provider you chose, for the messages Nova sends it.
- Web research (DuckDuckGo or your own SearXNG), email, weather and hazard feeds, and travel times, if you enable them.
- A text to speech service, if it isn't the local Piper voice.
If you run Ollama and the local Piper voice, nothing leaves your network. Wearable and sleep data are never sent to a cloud AI. Camera images are not kept, apart from confirmed intrusion snapshots, which are stored privately and shown only in your panel. The full list is in Privacy and your data.
Nova follows Home Assistant's language, and you can choose another under Settings, General. The setup dialog is available in 21 languages. The panel is translated in all 20 of its languages. Danish, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Turkish and Ukrainian have not yet been read by a native speaker, so corrections are welcome. Nova asks the voice to speak your language when the voice supports it. Safety alerts are translated for English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. See Translating Nova if you'd like to help.
Nova doesn't speak. Check that each room has a speaker assigned under Settings, Room Speakers. Then check Notifications only mode and quiet hours.
A camera tile is blank. Nest cameras need an extra step. See Camera setup.
Nova talks too much. Lower the banter level, turn on Notifications only, or set quiet hours. Critical safety alerts still speak.
Nova says nothing about something I expected. Open Logs, then Decisions. It shows what Nova saw and why it stayed quiet.
Something isn't working. Open the Diagnostics tab and run Setup Doctor. It lists problems with a plain fix for each.
How do I update? Update through HACS, restart Home Assistant, then hard refresh the panel.
How do I remove Nova? Remove the integration under Devices & Services, then remove it in HACS. Your nova/ folder stays until you delete it.
Can I change every setting? Yes. The full list is in Settings reference.
- Getting started: setup, AI models, where settings live, a tour of the panel
- What Nova includes: core features and the optional ones, and how to set each up
- Safety and security: intrusion, lockdown, things left open, smoke, leaks and freezing pipes
- Cameras and faces: doorbell, packages and mail, scene memory, faces
- Camera setup: Frigate, Eufy, Nest and go2rtc
- Weather warnings: Met Éireann, the US National Weather Service or a CAP feed
- Voice and speakers: speakers per room, broadcasts, language, how Nova addresses people
- Presence and alerts: who is home, rooms, sleep, quiet hours, mutes
- Routines and suggestions: leave alerts, offers, suggested automations, briefings, modes
- Memory and knowledge: facts, relations, documents, email, web research
- Voice recognition with your own service: using a speaker recognition service you already run
- Energy: the Energy tab and the outlook
- Host health: watching the machine Nova runs on
- Settings reference: every setting
- Privacy and your data: what is stored and what leaves
- How Nova works: for developers and the curious
- Translating Nova: help add or fix a language
- Roadmap: ideas under consideration
Nova is a solo project and changes quickly. Releases can include breaking changes, so read CHANGELOG.md before you update. It is usable today, but it isn't a set and forget integration yet.
Found a bug or have an idea? Issues and pull requests are welcome.
Nova includes work originally created by sam3gp8 and is distributed under the MIT License.