This ESPHome release brings a wave of fixes across the audio and voice pipeline. The i2s_audio component now keeps a start request that arrives while a speaker task is stopping, preventing missed playback commands. An MP3 stream info change is no longer treated as a fatal decoder error, avoiding unnecessary audio dropouts. A spurious driver failure in i2s_audio has been eliminated, and the broader audio stack—including micro_wake_word, microphone, mixer, resampler, and speaker—now uses proper locking and null checks instead of unsafe use_count() calls. As a new feature, the sendspin media source can now carry a codec preference list.
Core platform stability receives several important improvements. Stack traces from the logger are no longer garbled, and debug output now guards against empty reboot sources and checks the preferred source on ESP_RST_WDT. The build process skips PlatformIO’s private-package authorization probe, reducing flaky builds, and the bundled esphome-device-builder has been bumped to version 1.14.5. A use-after-free bug when deleting a running StaticTask has been fixed. Over-the-air updates are more resilient because a lost OTA chunk now gets extra time for retransmission. Security dependencies were also updated, with noise-c bumped to 0.1.26 and libsodium to 1.10021.8.
Numerous sensor and integration issues have been addressed. MQTT discovery restores the brightness flag for lights, and Dallas temperature sensors now filter out spurious 85°C readings during reset. BLE clients report the Established state even for nodes that never read services. The UDP component correctly rejects relocated packet_transport options. Tuya devices can now be built without a network component, and the LVGL graphics library gains a missing label dependency for qrcode, keyboard, and tabview widgets. RF bridge bucket sniffing with Portisch firmware is fixed, Anova cookers re-assert the temperature unit on every poll cycle, and the atm90e32 energy monitor verifies offset calibration writes.
