Dear community,
I am thrilled to announce the availability of our latest release: openHAB 5.2 is here! 
Exactly one year after the major milestone of openHAB 5.0, development is moving forward faster than ever. For this summer release, 141 contributors have put their efforts into 3,082 commits across our repositories to deliver a big update packed with new user-facing features, core enhancements, and incredible AI capabilities!
openHAB 5.2 marks a big step forward in how you interact with and configure your smart home:
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Chat & Natural Language: Main UI now includes a Chat interface that provides access to our new support for LLM-based human language interpreters (starting with Google Gemini). You can now text or talk to your openHAB instance naturally, with device control widgets rendering directly inside your conversation thread.
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The openHAB MCP Server: Thanks to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can now connect local or cloud-based AI agents (like Claude or ChatGPT) to securely manage your items, create rules, and even design Main UI pages for you.
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YAML for Everything: Power users, this is for you! We have introduced file-based YAML configuration support for UI pages, custom widgets, sitemaps, and rules. Combined with the new YAML Composer Add-on, managing and version-controlling modular configurations has never been easier.
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Embedded Log Viewer: You no longer need to switch browser tabs to debug or navigate back and forth through Main UI – a persistent, fully resizable Log Viewer Pane can now be toggled right at the bottom of Main UI while you configure your system.
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More Powerful Charting: Following a major TypeScript refactoring, our charting engine has received its biggest upgrade yet. It now fully supports display states (showing data in your preferred Item display units instead of raw system units), includes more sophisticated tooltips, expands UI-based styling options (colors, borders, axis styles), and adds multi-year periods alongside a new yearly aggregation view.
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Local Home Connect & Matter Upgrades: The new Home Connect Direct binding brings completely cloud-free, low-latency LAN control for your appliances. Meanwhile, our Matter integration has gained support for over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates and a beautiful new Thread network map visualization in Main UI.
…and that is just scratching the surface of the 19 new add-ons and countless core, sitemap, and Main UI upgrades included in this release!
Make sure to read our official release blog post to get the big picture of these changes. It does a fantastic job guiding you through the new features!
Check out the release notes to learn about all the changes. This release includes only a small number of breaking changes, so upgrading from openHAB 5.1 should be a very smooth process. However, please make sure to review the breaking changes section before upgrading to avoid any surprises.
A big thank you to everyone who contributed — developers, maintainers, testers, documentation writers, and community members alike. Your work continues to make openHAB better with every release.
Please use this topic for discussions about this release and feel encouraged to give us feedback!
Best regards,
Florian