Top story for Saturday, October 24, 2026

ESPHome adds cellular networking for ESP32 devices connected to a compatible modem over a serial cable. Makers can use its normal API, MQTT messaging and firmware-update services over the mobile data connection where Wi-Fi or Ethernet is unavailable.

Piper’s native speech library starts returning audio before it has synthesized an entire sentence. Applications such as screen readers can begin speaking sooner when they adopt the updated library and prepare a voice for streaming.

Music Assistant stops sending the connected Jellyfin account’s access token to everyone who can read its music library. The token appeared inside track and artwork addresses returned to clients, potentially exposing an account with administrator privileges.

Home Assistant stops one signed-in user from continuing another person’s conversation merely by supplying its identifier. Previously, that could carry over the conversation’s history and tools.

ZHA changes how it assigns addresses to new Zigbee groups, reducing the chance that a supposedly removed light responds to a new group’s commands. A device that was offline during deletion can retain its old group address; the previous allocator promptly reused that address.

Music Assistant’s phone player adds an optional 24-bit setting for lossless FLAC and uncompressed PCM audio. It supports Android 12 and newer and iOS; Opus playback remains 16-bit, and the new option starts off.

Home Assistant gives connected AI assistants a fuller timeline for investigating a failure. The system-management connection adds full logs around a chosen time, extending the recent warnings and errors it already supplied.

Z-Wave JS limits two kinds of incoming requests that could leave a network busy or unresponsive. A radio-test request must target a known device other than the controller, cannot request more than one thousand test frames, and cannot restart a test already running.