OpenClaw v2026.4.25: TTS Overhaul, PWA Gateway, and OpenTelemetry

OpenClaw's April 27 stable release — v2026.4.25 — landed today and it's one of the largest single-version drops in recent memory. Five major areas get meaningful upgrades: voice/TTS, the web UI, observability, browser automation, and plugin infrastructure. Here's what changed.

Voice Gets a Complete Overhaul

The headline feature is the TTS system rewrite. Six new providers land in this release: Azure Speech, Xiaomi, Local CLI, Inworld, Volcengine, and ElevenLabs v3. Each ships with full credential wiring, voice listing, and native output format support — Azure Speech, for example, generates Ogg/Opus voice notes and supports SSML escaping out of the box.

Beyond new providers, the TTS surface itself becomes far more configurable:

• /tts latest enables read-aloud in WhatsApp with duplicate suppression
• /tts chat on|off|default toggles session-scoped auto-TTS per conversation
• agents.list[].tts lets individual agents override the global voice without touching shared credentials
• Per-channel overrides now deep-merge correctly for Feishu and QQBot accounts

Discord voice channels also gain channels.discord.voice.model — you can now route voice channel responses through a different LLM than the text default. (PR #64368)

PWA and Web Push for Gateway Chat

The OpenClaw Control UI adds full Progressive Web App support in this release (PR #44590). You can now install Gateway chat as a standalone app from any Chromium-based browser, with Web Push notifications so you don't miss agent replies when the tab is in the background.

The same UI update also ships Crestodian's new first-run TUI setup flow — a full interactive terminal wizard that replaces the previous manual config dance. A context mode selector and shorter startup greeting round out the onboarding experience.

OpenTelemetry Expands Across the Stack

OpenTelemetry coverage in v2026.4.25 is no longer just model calls — it now spans the entire request lifecycle:

• Model calls — GenAI span attributes aligned with the OpenTelemetry stability opt-in semantics (gen_ai.provider.name under OTEL_SEMCONV_STABILITY_OPT_IN=gen_ai_latest_experimental)
• Token usage and tool loops — bounded low-cardinality attributes throughout
• Harness runs — openclaw.harness.run spans and openclaw.harness.duration_ms metrics for Codex, QA-lab, and future harnesses
• Exec processes and outbound delivery — end-to-end trace coverage
• Prometheus plugin — a new bundled diagnostics-prometheus plugin adds a protected gateway scrape route for Prometheus-compatible metrics

Signal-specific OTLP endpoint overrides are now supported via config or standard OTEL_* environment variables, and W3C traceparent headers propagate from trusted model-call trace context to provider transports.

Browser Automation Improvements

Browser support picks up several quality-of-life fixes aimed at reliability on lower-powered hosts:

• CDP readiness timeouts are now configurable — critical for Raspberry Pi users where Chrome launch is slow (issue #66803)
• openclaw browser start --headless added as a one-shot headless launch that doesn't rewrite your persisted browser config
• Iframe-aware role snapshots with CDP-native fallback improve accuracy on complex pages
• openclaw browser doctor --deep now probes live snapshot state for slower hosts

Plugin Cold Registry

Plugin startup and install paths move to a cold persisted registry in v2026.4.25. Broad manifest scans at startup are replaced by a versioned registry index, making plugin update, repair, provider discovery, and install metadata more deterministic and faster.

openclaw plugins registry is a new CLI command for inspecting and repairing the registry directly. openclaw plugins list now reads from the cold snapshot by default. The legacy OPENCLAW_DISABLE_PERSISTED_PLUGIN_REGISTRY environment variable is deprecated and flagged as a break-glass switch — the recommended path is openclaw doctor --fix.

Also in This Release

• Google Meet gets calendar-backed attendance export workflows, export manifests, and dry-run previews
• CLI image generation exposes --background as a generic flag (not just OpenAI), and fal image generation gains --output-format png|jpeg
• Plugin hooks add before-agent-finalize, cron jobId context, and Codex MCP hook relay support (PR #71765)
• Bundled tokenjuice runtime bumps to 0.6.3

Update Now

npm update -g openclaw

Full changelog and upgrade notes: github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.4.25