OpenClaw v2026.4.1: Voice Wake, SearXNG, Cron Tool Allowlists, and More

OpenClaw v2026.4.1 landed today (April 1st, 16:58 UTC) with a dense changelog: 14 new features and a long string of fixes across exec approvals, Telegram, tasks, and the gateway. This is a meaningful quality-of-life release for power users who run cron automation, macOS desktops, and Bedrock-backed deployments.

Headline Features

/tasks in Chat

The most user-facing addition is /tasks — a new chat-native command that surfaces your background task board directly in the current session. You can now check recent task details, agent-local fallback counts, and task status without leaving the conversation. Thanks to @vincentkoc for driving this one home.

macOS Voice Wake

macOS users get a new Voice Wake option (#58490) that triggers Talk Mode hands-free. If you run OpenClaw on a Mac and use voice regularly, this is the upgrade you didn't know you were waiting for. Contributed by @SmoothExec.

Bundled SearXNG Web Search

Privacy-focused users take note: OpenClaw now ships a SearXNG provider plugin for web_search (#57317). Point it at your own SearXNG instance via the configurable host setting and skip the third-party API entirely. This is huge for fully self-hosted setups. Thanks to @cgdusek.

Per-Job Cron Tool Allowlists

Cron automation gets a security upgrade: openclaw cron --tools (#58504) now accepts per-job tool allowlists. Instead of giving every scheduled job the full tool surface, you can whittle it down to exactly what that job needs. Contributed by @andyk-ms.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails

The bundled Bedrock provider now supports AWS Bedrock Guardrails — letting you enforce content policies, topic filters, and PII controls at the infrastructure layer. @MikeORed contributed this one.

Z.AI glm-5.1 and glm-5v-turbo

The Z.AI provider catalog picks up two new models: glm-5.1 and glm-5v-turbo (#58793). Thanks to @tomsun28.

Other Notable Additions

Agents/default params — agents.defaults.params for global default provider parameters (#58548)
Agents/failover — smarter rate-limit retry capping before cross-provider model fallback, with a new auth.cooldowns.rateLimitedProfileRotations knob (#58707)
Feishu/Drive comments — full comment-thread context resolution and in-thread replies for document collaboration (#58497)
Gateway/webchat — chatHistoryMaxChars and per-request maxChars for configurable history truncation (#58900)
WhatsApp reactions — reactionLevel guidance in agent system prompts
Telegram errors — configurable errorPolicy and errorCooldownMs to suppress repeated delivery errors per chat/topic (#51914)

Key Fixes

The fix list is equally meaty:

Exec/approvals — allow-always now correctly persists as durable trust rather than acting like allow-once. Windows approval fallback no longer hard-dead-ends remote exec.
Gateway/reload — startup config writes no longer trigger restart loops. Auth token generation and seeded Control UI origins are excluded from reload detection.
Tasks/gateway — a critical fix for gateways hanging ~1 minute post-upgrade due to synchronous SQLite pressure in the maintenance sweep (#58670)
Sessions/model switching — /model changes now queue behind busy runs instead of interrupting the active turn.
Telegram/exec approvals — forum-topic approval followups now stay in the originating topic (#58783).
Gateway/HTTP — one broken HTTP facade no longer forces all endpoints to return 500 (#58746)

Upgrade

Update via your usual method:

npm install -g openclaw@latest
# or
openclaw update

Full changelog on GitHub Releases.