Two-way audio for camera entities

Many cameras and doorbells have a speaker, so you can talk to whoever is standing at the door. As of Home Assistant Core 2026.11, camera entities can declare that they support two-way audio. Users can then talk through the camera while they watch its live stream.

Two-way audio starts as a preview feature in Home Assistant Labs. Users turn it on under Settings > System > Labs.

Set the new camera_entity_capabilities property to a CameraEntityCapabilities instance with two_way_audio as True. This property defaults to CameraEntityCapabilities(), where two_way_audio is False.

Only declare two-way audio when the camera can actually receive audio over the stream Home Assistant uses. For example, the Reolink integration declares it only when the camera supports two-way audio and Home Assistant streams from it over RTSP (home-assistant/core#184716).

Example:

from homeassistant.components.camera import (
    Camera,
    CameraEntityCapabilities,
    CameraEntityFeature,
)


class MyCamera(Camera):
    """A doorbell camera with a speaker."""

    _attr_supported_features = CameraEntityFeature.STREAM

    def __init__(self, device: MyDevice) -> None:
        """Initialize the camera."""
        super().__init__()
        self._device = device
        self._attr_camera_entity_capabilities = CameraEntityCapabilities(
            two_way_audio=device.supports_two_way_audio and device.protocol == "rtsp"
        )

Your entity declares what the camera can do. The camera platform decides what the frontend gets. It reports two-way audio only when all of these hold:

• Your entity declares two-way audio.
• The camera streams over WebRTC, natively or through a WebRTC provider like go2rtc. Two-way audio is not available over HLS.
• The user turned on the Two-way audio preview feature in Labs.

Browsers only give access to the microphone over a secure connection. For now, two-way audio only works when Home Assistant is opened over HTTPS.

The camera entity documentation describes two-way audio, and the Labs documentation explains how preview features work.