OpenClaw dropped v2026.5.26-beta.1 tonight and it's a big one — 90+ changes spanning a brand-new Meeting Notes plugin, Transcript capture, a faster image backend, and a multi-layer performance push that touches almost every hot path in the Gateway.
Meeting Notes and Transcripts Are Here
The headline feature is the new Meeting Notes plugin: a source-only external plugin that auto-captures meeting content and turns it into structured summaries. Discord voice is the first live capture source, with manual transcript imports supported from day one. The CLI gets a read-only openclaw meeting-notes command, and the whole thing runs outside the core npm package — meaning it doesn't add to install weight unless you need it.
Alongside this, OpenClaw now ships core Transcript support with a renamed Transcripts docs surface and CLI entry point. It's designed to back meeting summaries, but the source-provider contract is generic enough for future channels to plug in.
Sharp Is Gone — Hello Rastermill
One of the more impactful under-the-hood changes: OpenClaw replaces Sharp with Rastermill for all image processing (metadata, resizing, EXIF orientation, PNG alpha-preserving optimization). The practical effect is that a standard OpenClaw install no longer pulls in Sharp or the WhatsApp Jimp fallback — leaner installs, fewer native build surprises. (#86437)
Gateway Performance Gets Serious
This release consolidates a substantial multi-PR performance push:
- Plugin metadata caching — snapshots are reused across startup, config, model, channel, setup, and secret paths instead of re-reading manifests on each hot-path call
- Lazy-loading — startup-idle plugin work, core method handlers, and the ACPX runtime are deferred so the Gateway reaches its health/ready signal faster
- Channel catalog and session data — cached process-locally so repeated reads during gateway operation hit memory, not disk
- Reply delivery — visible reply latency is cut by separating user-facing sends from slower follow-up work, deferring compaction maintenance, and lazy-loading slash-command startup metadata
Voice and Talk Improvements
Real-time voice got a meaningful upgrade. While a consult is still running, WebUI and Discord voice callers can now ask for status, cancel, steer, or queue follow-up work — no more waiting for the agent to finish before you can redirect it. (#84231)
Wake-name handling is also tighter: stricter ambient-speech filtering without breaking fuzzy wake phrases, plus a raised context budget for profiles with longer USER.md and SOUL.md files.
Android, iOS, and Channel Updates
- Android gets a new pair-new-gateway action and improved Talk mode with offline voice/gateway recovery (#86798)
- iOS gets direct realtime voice sessions in Talk mode with a compact toolbar and responsive waveform feedback (#86355)
- Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp all gain thumb-approval reactions — 👍 resolves allow-once, 👎 resolves deny — so mobile approval flows work without typing
/approve - Discord's model picker now buckets large provider lists into alphabetical segments (e.g., A–G · H–N · O–Z) when the list exceeds 25 items, keeping giant wildcard configs navigable in one click
Activity Tab and Observability
The Control UI gains an Activity tab — an ephemeral, sanitized live summary of tool activity without persisting raw telemetry. (#12831, thanks @BunsDev) Alongside this, OpenTelemetry LLM content spans, gateway secret-prep traces, and alertable signals for blocked tools, failover, stale sessions, and oversized payloads all land in this release.
Cron Gets a Saner Default
Scheduled automations now have cron.maxConcurrentRuns defaulting to 8 instead of requiring explicit configuration. Multi-step cron jobs should behave more predictably out of the box.
Named Model Auth Profiles
The openclaw models auth login command can now store a returned provider auth profile under a requested --profile-id, and Codex OAuth named profile setup is documented. A parallel PR (#85667) adds broader named model login profile support with credential migration for Hermes, OpenCode, and Codex auth profiles.
Upgrade
The release is available now as a pre-release on npm:
npm install -g openclaw@2026.5.26-beta.1
Full changelog: github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.5.26-beta.1