OpenClaw started as a way to talk to AI through your favorite chat apps. But the community has pushed it somewhere nobody expected: into the physical world. Your AI agent can now control your lights, lock your doors, adjust your thermostat, and queue up music — all from a Telegram message or a WhatsApp voice note.
Here's what's happening on the smart home front.
SwitchBot AI Hub: The First Hardware With Native OpenClaw Support
In February 2026, SwitchBot announced the AI Hub — the world's first local home AI agent with native OpenClaw support. This isn't a cloud relay or a hacky workaround. The AI Hub runs OpenClaw locally on the device itself, connecting to SwitchBot's ecosystem of smart curtains, locks, plugs, humidifiers, and sensors.
What makes this notable:
- •Local processing: Your commands stay on your network. No cloud round-trip for basic operations.
- •Frigate integration: The AI Hub connects to Frigate for camera-based AI detection — person recognition, package delivery alerts, pet monitoring.
- •Home Assistant bridge: It acts as a bridge between SwitchBot devices and Home Assistant, so you get the best of both ecosystems.
This is the first time a hardware manufacturer has shipped a product with OpenClaw baked in. It signals that the project has moved from developer toy to something consumer electronics companies are willing to bet on.
Home Assistant: The Community's Favorite Pairing
The Home Assistant integration is arguably the most mature smart home setup for OpenClaw. A dedicated Home Assistant Add-On runs OpenClaw in a supervised container with direct access to your HA configuration.
What you can do:
- •Natural language control: "Turn off all the lights downstairs" or "Set the bedroom to 21 degrees" — no YAML editing required.
- •Automation creation: Ask your agent to create automations. "When I leave home, turn off the lights and lock the front door" gets translated into HA automations.
- •Status queries: "Is the garage door open?" or "What's the temperature in the living room?" — your agent reads entity states in real time.
- •Scene management: Create and trigger scenes through conversation.
The HA community forum thread has been active since early 2026, with users sharing configurations for everything from irrigation systems to EV charger scheduling.
Raspberry Pi: The $50 Smart Home Brain
For users who want a dedicated, always-on smart home controller without the power draw of a full PC, the Raspberry Pi 5 has become the go-to option. Multiple deployment guides cover secure installation on Pi hardware, and the community has even pushed OpenClaw onto LoRa gateways for long-range IoT sensor networks.
A typical Pi setup:
- •Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) running OpenClaw headless
- •Zigbee coordinator for direct device control
- •Home Assistant on the same device or a separate instance
- •Telegram or WhatsApp as the control interface
Total hardware cost: under $100 for a fully functional AI-powered smart home hub.
Voice Assistants and Music
OpenClaw doesn't replace Alexa or Google Home — it orchestrates them. The `alexa-cli` skill lets your agent control Echo speakers, smart lights, thermostats, and locks through Amazon's ecosystem. You get the convenience of Alexa's device compatibility with the intelligence of an LLM-powered agent.
On the music side, the `spotify-player` and `home-music` skills enable whole-house audio control. Queue up a playlist, adjust volume across rooms, or ask your agent to "play something chill in the kitchen" — it handles the Spotify API calls and Airfoil routing.
What This Means
The smart home space has been waiting for a natural language layer that actually works. Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant handle simple commands fine, but they fall apart with complex, multi-step requests. OpenClaw fills that gap because it can reason about context, chain actions together, and remember your preferences.
"Turn on the porch light when it gets dark, but only if I'm home" is a trivial request for an LLM-powered agent. For a traditional voice assistant, it requires manual automation setup.
The combination of SwitchBot's hardware commitment, Home Assistant's deep integration, and the Raspberry Pi community's enthusiasm suggests that smart home control is becoming a first-class use case for OpenClaw — not just a side project.
We're watching this space closely. If you've built something interesting with OpenClaw and your smart home, we'd love to hear about it in the community Discord.