Extend Assist with home management help, starting with documentation

[nielsrowinbik]

Problem statement

Home Assistant's Assist feature is built for home control: turning lights on, adjusting the thermostat, running a script. But managing a home, configuring automations, diagnosing problems, understanding what a setting does, is a different kind of task, and Assist offers no help with it today. Home maintainers who need guidance are on their own, searching docs, browsing forums, or turning to external AI tools that know nothing about their setup.

This is the first step in a broader effort to bring AI-powered management help into Home Assistant. For the full vision, see the AI in Home Assistant vision document (TODO: Add link). This opportunity establishes the split between "control" and "management" as a product concept, and validates it with a first concrete capability: documentation access.

Community signals

• Multiple custom integrations exist (most notably ha-mcp, with 2600 stars on GitHub) that add AI-assisted home management to Home Assistant, indicating strong demand for this kind of capability.
• This demand is confirmed by the numerous posts on Reddit, like this one, and articles on tech news outlets, like this one The Verge, all explaining how powerful being able to use AI with Home Assistant can be.

While none of these ask for what we've proposed in this opportunity specifically, they clearly signal the enormous amount of potential of our overall vision that this opportunity contributes to.

Scope & Boundaries

In scope

• A "home management" mode toggle within the existing Assist dialog that switches between control and management capabilities
• HA documentation retrieval as the first management capability: the assistant can look up and explain documentation in response to maintainer questions
• The toggle and mode distinction as a reusable foundation for future management capabilities

Not in scope

• Context awareness (knowing what the user is looking at when they open Assist) — that is a separate opportunity
• Any authoring or editing actions such as creating automations or modifying dashboards
• Changes to the Assist dialog surface or layout
• Expanding or modifying the existing home control capabilities of Assist

Foreseen solution

A way, possibly a toggle, possibly auto-inferred, for the user to switch the Assist dialog into "management mode." In this mode, the assistant has access to HA documentation and can answer questions about how things work, what settings mean, and how to approach a task. The control pipeline remains unchanged and is still accessible via the same dialog. This capability will only be available to Home Assistant users with admin access.

In the video below, we show a quick prototype on what the Assist dialog may look like once this opportunity is done. Note how there is no toggle. It also provides a sneak peak on extended capabilities and how we envision we will handle permissions.

CleanShot.2026-05-06.at.12.38.46.mp4

Risks & open questions

• AI back-end: Users can bring their own AI provider, but is HA Cloud's own offering sufficient for a good out-of-the-box documentation experience?
• Documentation retrieval approach: RAG over hosted docs vs. live retrieval from docs.home-assistant.io have different tradeoffs in latency, accuracy, and infrastructure. This decision should be made early.
• Toggle discoverability: Will users understand what the toggle does and when to use it? Worth testing with real users early.
• Privacy: Even read-only management queries may include home configuration details depending on future scope. Establish the privacy principle now, before context is added.

Appetite

Medium — 1 cycle. The toggle concept is lightweight, and documentation retrieval is a well-understood problem. The main investment is the back-end integration and the mode distinction in the UI.

Execution issues

No response

Decision log

Date	Decision	Outcome