How do you solve the problem of growing a popular smart home platform committed to open-source, open-standard ideals into something bigger that stays true to those ideals? You create a foundation. At least, that’s the approach Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen has chosen.
Technology
The little smart home platform that could
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25407150/STK266_Home_Assistant_2_CVirginia.jpg?ssl=1 "The little smart home platform that could")
This week, Home Assistant announced it is now part of the Open Home Foundation. The newly formed non-profit will own and govern all of Home Assistant and its related entities. Its creators and inaugural board members — Schoutsen, Guy Sie, Pascal Vizeli, and J. Nick Koston — all work on Home Assistant, and the foundation has no other members so far.
In a press release, the foundation stated its aim is “to fight against surveillance capitalism, and offer a counterbalance to Big Tech influence, in the smart home — by focusing on privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart home users.”
A community-built, open-source smart home platform, Home Assistant differs from its major “big tech” competitors — such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, because it offers four things simultaneously: local control of your smart home that can be faster and more reliable than the cloud: authority over and access to all your data; compatibility with almost every connected gadget — regardless of protocol or manufacturer; and the ability to make them work together. While many competitors offer some of these, few offer all.
“I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale.”
Home Assistant is known for its unmatched power and flexibility, but so far the platform, which has an estimated one million users, has struggled to reach the mainstream. Home Assistant can have a steep learning curve, especially when compared to the relative simplicity of a platform like Alexa or Apple Home. Onboarding devices can be complicated, the UI has lots of room for improvement, and integrations can be hit or miss.
“Home Assistant is no one’s first smart home platform,” says Schoutsen. “When people outgrow their existing systems and want more advanced control, that’s when they come to Home Assistant.” But he sees that the platform is at a tipping point.
With the arrival of the industry-backed smart home standard Matter (with which Home Assistant is heavily involved), smart home adoption is pushing into the mainstream. Home Assistant wants to stay swimming alongside Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and Google, all of which it’s been competing with in the smart home for roughly a decade now. Home Assistant has never accepted investors, says Schoutsen, and he sees a foundation as the best way to grow.
Schoutsen outlined the platform’s future roadmap at its annual State of the Open Home presentation on Saturday, April 20th. In an interview ahead of the live stream, he told The Verge about some of the bigger changes planned for Home Assistant following this transition:
- The Home Assistant Green smart home hub will be sold on Amazon this year, the first time the organization will sell directly to consumers. A new line of Home Assistant Connect dongles for Thread / Zigbee and Z-Wave will follow. These connect the hub to gadgets that use those protocols (and will replace the SkyConnect dongle).
- The Home Assistant Works With program, which offers certification for products that work with the platform, is expanding. New partners include Aqara, Ultraloq, and Jasco.
- A new Home Assistant voice control hardware device running Home Assistant’s local smart home voice assistant is planned for release at the end of the year.
- Home Assistant is working with Nvidia to incorporate a local AI model into the home automation platform.
- The platform has been researching ways to improve its UI to make it easier for everyone in the home to use Home Assistant. It’s calling this the “Home-approval factor,” a variant on the wife- or spouse-approval factor that encompasses everyone in a home.
(See sidebar for more on these.)
The collective goal of all these efforts is to move Home Assistant toward becoming a more mainstream, out-of-the-box option for smart home users. “We want to be a consumer brand,” says Schoutsen. “You should be able to walk into a Home Depot and be like, ‘I care about my privacy; this is the smart home hub I need.’”
The foundation will also advocate for the development of “better” smart home products, says Schoutsen, “Devices with local APIs and that are built sustainably. Because there needs to be products compatible with Home Assistant that you can trust.”
Is Home Assistant all grown up now?
Schoutsen, who started Home Assistant in 2013 with a Philips Hue smart lighting bridge, a Python script, and a mission to control his lights any way he wanted to, sees the foundation as necessary to both protect Home Assistant and move it forward. “I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale,” he says. The new ownership structure provides a stronger platform for growth. “It gives us a way for people to take us seriously, to help us reach a bigger audience,” he says.
To date, the informal way Home Assistant operates has been confusing to companies looking to partner with the platform, says Schoutsen. The launch of the for-profit Nabu Casa five years ago provided a revenue stream for Home Assistant through an optional cloud computing service that now supports 33 full-time employees.
The foundation, which was created last month as a Verein (“association”) in Switzerland, formally separates Nabu Casa from Home Assistant. The foundation will own all of the open-source projects, standards, drivers, and libraries associated with Home Assistant, along with ESPHome, ZigPy, and Wyoming.
Nabu Casa will continue as a for-profit entity running the cloud and selling Home Assistant hardware and will operate as a commercial partner of the foundation. “Funding and support can only flow one way—from Nabu Casa, and any future partners, to the Open Home Foundation and its projects,” says Pascal Vizeli, co-founder of Nabu Casa, and a foundation board member.
It also protects Home Assistant from being sold. Swiss law prohibits members of a non-profit Verein from benefiting from it, Schoutsen explained to The Verge. “Our articles state ‘There will be no direct distribution to members in return for activities performed for the association or as any other form of gratuity in any kind,’’’ he says. Similarly, he says the foundation can only have income from membership fees, donations, license programs, and contributions from partners.
Still, Home Assistant users may be wary of these larger structural changes. The Verge asked Schoutsen how he could assuage any fears that this will negatively impact current users. It’s hard not to draw parallels with SmartThings’ shift to become a more “consumer-friendly” platform following its purchase by Samsung.
“We’re constantly doing this balance between ease of use and advanced features and I don’t know how we are going to keep balancing this,” he said. “But we cannot forget about our power users. The platform is open; maybe at some point, there might be a split where we have the basic UI and the advanced UI; I don’t know how that’s going to work. But because we are open, because our data is accessible, they’re all part of the community, even if they don’t use our specific tools that we’re building.”
“There’s a bigger audience that I would like to reach that we don’t today.”
He is also wary of entering the business side of the smart home while recognizing its necessity to grow Home Assistant. “We need to be very careful moving into this space,” he says. “The challenge with partnership people is that they’re very business-focused. And that’s not how we operate.”
He hopes the foundation will provide the necessary building blocks for growth while protecting the platform’s core beliefs and values. “I think we can get even bigger now that we have this stepping stone. The foundation is a real entity. People will take us more seriously. I think the press will take us more seriously. There’s a bigger audience that I would like to reach that we don’t today.”
While today’s mainstream smart home platforms offer simple and convenient ways to control your smart lights, locks, and other gadgets, the lack of access to your data, limited options for local control over devices, and some platforms’ over-reliance on the cloud can put the user at a disadvantage.
Matter — which aims to bring local control and interoperability across all smart home devices and platforms—is designed to solve some of these problems. But Matter isn’t a platform; you’ll still need to use an app on your phone or computer to control your home. Home Assistant wants to be that app.
Can it move fast enough? There’s a long road between forming a foundation and packing Home Depots with Home Assistant hubs and gadgets that pledge Home Assistant loyalty. In the meantime, Matter is also providing other platforms — such as Aqara, Homey, and Hubitat — the tools to expand and grow into more viable alternatives to big tech in the smart home. It’s going to be interesting to see where everything lands.
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In this new era of console… inclusivity? driven by Sony and mostly Microsoft bringing their exclusives to other platforms, it’s getting harder to highlight games that make a singular console shine. Indeed, the top-performing games year after year on both PlayStation and Xbox are multiplatform releases, and often the best games of the year, like 2025 GOTY winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, similarly launch on most everything. (Once again, like in all things, Nintendo is the exception.)
But while lists like this will probably disappear as we get deeper into the era of everything being an Xbox, Sony still seems committed to high-quality exclusives. Here are its best of 2025.
Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
As software exclusivity goes the way of Sega’s console business, console makers have other ways to attract consumers to their part of the video game ecosystem. For Microsoft, it’s Game Pass; for Sony in 2025, it’s the PlayStation Portal. This year, Sony launched an update for the Portal that enables cloud streaming and making the device a must-have for PlayStation households. For $200, roughly half the price of a PS5, you essentially get a second one, able to play select games without the need to stream them from the console. The list of streamable games isn’t comprehensive, but there are over 2,000 of them, and the ability to play them on the go is a literal game changer.
Get into a discussion with true Final Fantasy sickos about the top 10 games in the franchise, and you better have a lot of time and earplugs on your hands as everyone debates entries two through 10 — because No. 1, invariably, is Final Fantasy Tactics. Having finally played the game for the first time, taking advantage of the remaster Square Enix released this year, I get it. The best video games are often timeless while also able to speak to a specific moment, and Tactics’ story is and does exactly that.
But more than narrative, Tactics’ brilliance is also in its expansive job system that grants players a facsimile of godhood that’s so much fun to wield. The arithmetician class has the ability to cast any learned spell in the game instantly and without requiring mana. To offset the class’s ruinously slow speed, pair it with white mage to create the most diabolical unit in the history of strategy RPGs. Ramza Beoulve is just a guy trying to save the world, and FFT made me believe he can because I made his ragtag band of misfits into walking nuclear weapons.
Sucker Punch’s sequel to Ghost of Tsushima plays things relatively safe. It doesn’t change things up dramatically but instead polishes the experience. Which means the experience isn’t all that different from its predecessor — that means lush landscapes to explore, lots of combat techniques to learn, and, uh, plenty of hot springs to bathe in — but everything feels more finely tuned this time around. That’s especially true of the game’s tale of revenge, which is both more gripping than the original and also gives the open-world experience some much-needed structure.
The original Death Stranding was so weird that half of the fun was just wrapping your head around the experience. I’m not sure I really understood it until I was almost done (if at all). The sequel is still plenty weird, but because it builds off of the previous game, it’s also much easier to understand from the get-go. It’s still a delivery simulator where you trek across a postapocalyptic landscape to get goods and people where they’re needed. But now the setting has shifted to Australia, which means there are new environmental elements to deal with — hello, sandstorms — along with a whole new cast of weirdo characters to meet, played by everyone from Elle Fanning to George Miller.
But don’t worry; the story is still as inscrutable as ever.
Bennett Foddy sure made you feel the “walking” part of this elaborate walking simulator. In Baby Steps, your job is to walk, and you do that by controlling every move involved in taking a step, down to the fine motor details. What results is a hilarious examination of human psychology, emotional maturity, and a newfound appreciation for just how hard it is to ambulate a body with nothing more than DualSense trigger buttons.
When Lumines Arise was first announced, I made the mistake of asking, “Oh, is it a series or something?”, unfamiliar with Lumines’ days as a PSP powerhouse. My elders have never let me live that down, so I thought I’d see for myself what the game is.
Lumines Arise is Evil Dr. Tetris Effect Mean Bean Machine. Mean Bean Machine in that the game is played by globbing together matching blocks in two-by-two configurations. It’s part Tetris Effect because the game has an incredible synth / pop-house soundtrack that’s synced to the action, creating a full-body puzzle-playing experience. And evil in that the game is hard as shit. My skills as a Tetris player, limited though they are, just do not transfer to Lumines Arise. But! There is a flow state I can reach. Throughout playing, the shapes of the blocks will change from blocks, to eggs, to clocks, whatever, and I’ve found some patterns are easier to group than others. It’s interesting and fun to figure out what shapes make the game easier for me and which ones are impossible to configure.
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Can ChatGPT Really Help With Parenting?
Jenny Failla and Madison Alworth join the panel on “Fox News Saturday Night” to share their thoughts on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitting he relies on ChatGPT to help with parenting.
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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has moved at an unusually fast pace in 2025. According to the company, it launched GPT-5 in August, followed by GPT-5.1 in November. Now, just weeks later, GPT-5.2 has launched with familiar claims of being the smartest and most capable ChatGPT yet.
At first glance, the rapid rollout might seem surprising. But there’s context behind it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly called a “code red” inside the company, urging teams to move faster on improving ChatGPT. That push comes as competition heats up. Google recently released Gemini 3, which reportedly outperformed ChatGPT on several artificial intelligence benchmarks and delivered stronger image generation. At the same time, Anthropic’s Claude continues to advance quickly.
Against that backdrop, GPT-5.2 feels less like a routine upgrade and more like a strategic response. So what actually changed in GPT-5.2, and why does OpenAI say it matters?
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AMAZON ADDS CONTROVERSIAL AI FACIAL RECOGNITION TO RING
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on as he takes a lunch break, during the Federal Reserve’s Integrated Review of the Capital Framework for Large Banks Conference in Washington, D.C., July 22, 2025. (REUTERS/Ken Cedeno)
What exactly is GPT-5.2
GPT-5.2 is the newest version in OpenAI’s flagship 5-series of large language models. Like its predecessor, it includes two default variants. GPT-5.2 Instant is designed for everyday chatting and web searches. GPT-5.2 Thinking is meant for more complex tasks like long reasoning chains and multi-step problem solving. These two models are now the default for all ChatGPT users, including free users. They replace GPT-5.1 Instant and Thinking entirely. If you are using ChatGPT today, you are already using GPT-5.2, whether you realize it or not.
What OpenAI says GPT-5 brings to ChatGPT
At the same time, OpenAI continues to position GPT-5 as “expert intelligence for everyone.” The company says GPT-5 delivers stronger performance across math, science, finance, law and other complex subjects. In OpenAI’s view, ChatGPT now acts more like a team of on-demand experts than a basic chatbot. To support that claim, OpenAI points to practical examples. These include better coding help, more expressive writing support, clearer health-related explanations and improved safety and accuracy. The company showcases use cases such as generating app code, writing speeches, explaining medications and correcting mistakes in user-submitted images. In theory, GPT-5.2 builds on that same foundation. However, while OpenAI emphasizes deeper thinking and more reliable answers, those gains remain subtle for many everyday users.
What new features does GPT-5.2 add?
Here’s the short answer. None. GPT-5.2 does not introduce new tools, interfaces, or headline features. Instead, OpenAI describes a series of behind-the-scenes improvements that supposedly make ChatGPT faster, smarter and more capable. According to OpenAI, GPT-5.2 performs better at:
- Building presentations
- Completing complex projects
- Creating spreadsheets
- Understanding long context windows
- Interpreting images
- Using tools more effectively
Kurt Knutsson reviews the new features in ChatGPT-5.2. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
OpenAI also released new benchmarks showing GPT-5.2 outperforming GPT-5.1 and competing models by small margins. However, big numbers on charts do not always translate into noticeable improvements for real users.
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Why testing chatbot improvements is tricky
Evaluating chatbot upgrades is harder than it sounds. Responses can vary widely even when prompts stay the same. A model might excel at one task and struggle with a nearly identical one just moments later. On top of that, OpenAI’s 5-series models already perform at or near the top of the field. When performance starts that high, meaningful gains become harder to detect. With that in mind, we tested GPT-5.2, and in most tests, it behaved almost identically to GPT-5.1.
Why benchmarks don’t tell the full story
OpenAI’s benchmarks show modest gains for GPT-5.2. That matters for researchers and developers working at scale. Still, even advanced users may struggle to see practical benefits. Other companies have delivered clearer upgrades. Google’s Gemini Nano Banana Pro model shows obvious gains in AI image generation and editing. Those improvements are easy for anyone to test and verify. By contrast, GPT-5.2’s changes feel abstract. They exist mostly on paper rather than in daily use.
What this means to you
If you pay for ChatGPT, there’s little downside to using GPT-5.2. It replaces GPT-5.1 in the model lineup and generally performs at least as well in everyday use. Free users don’t have much choice either, as model access is handled automatically. For most people, the experience feels familiar and stable.
The picture shifts slightly for programmers and those who use it for business. Early pricing details suggest GPT-5.2 may cost roughly 40 percent more per million tokens than GPT-5.1, depending on usage tier and access method. That makes testing important before committing at scale.
ChatGPT-5.2 works fine but may not feel exciting, Kurt Knutsson writes. (Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In short, GPT-5.2 works fine. It simply may not feel exciting.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
GPT-5.2 feels like a model released under pressure rather than inspiration. It performs well, stays reliable, and moves forward in measurable ways. Still, it doesn’t deliver the kind of clear progress many people expect from a new version number. OpenAI remains a leader in AI, but competition is closing in fast. As rivals roll out more noticeable improvements, small updates may no longer be enough to stand out. For now, GPT-5.2 feels less like a breakthrough and more like OpenAI holding its ground.
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For years, Samsung has made products that try to camouflage what they are by displaying works of art. The Frame TV is the most famous example, but the company also released the Music Frame, a speaker disguised as a picture frame, at last year’s CES. Now, instead of hiding a speaker with a piece of art, Samsung worked with designer Erwan Bouroullec to make a speaker into a piece of art.
According to Samsung, the Music Studio line of speakers, debuting at CES 2026, draw inspiration from the “timeless dot concept” found throughout music and art. As a musician, the Music Studio 5 reminds me of a fermata, the symbol meant to hold a note or silence. It has a 4-inch woofer and dual tweeters with built-in waveguide.
The larger Music Studio 7 is a 3.1.1-channel speaker that can be used on its own, in a pair for wider stereo sound, or with compatible Samsung Wi-Fi speakers, soundbars, or TVs using the company’s Q-Symphony technology. The Studio 7 is capable of playing high-resolution audio up to 24-bit/96kHz, and it and the Music Studio 5 use AI Dynamic Bass Control to extend bass response.
Sometimes these aesthetic-first speakers forget about the most important part of a speaker — its sound quality. But Samsung has done an impressive job over the past few years with its audio tuning which makes me optimistic for the Music Studio’s performance.
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