Home IoT deployments including multi-vendor appliances and cloud services are becoming commonplace. In this talk, I relate my first impressions of Home Assistant, an open-source software project driven by a community of home automation enthusiasts which is approaching maturity after 12 years of development. I describe my experience setting up a base system at home, learning about ESP32 microcontrollers and self-hosted voice assistants, and then taking Home Assistant to work as a convenient base platform for voice-controlled, LLM powered demos.