OpenClaw v2026.5.4 Stable: Gemini Voice, File Transfer, and a Much Faster Gateway

OpenClaw v2026.5.4 landed as a stable release today, graduating from a busy beta cycle that touched voice calls, file operations, streaming UX, channel reliability, and gateway cold-start performance. Here is what changed.

Google Meet Gets a Real Voice Bridge

The headline feature is a rewritten voice path for Google Meet Twilio dial-in joins (#77064). Calls now route audio through the realtime Gemini voice bridge instead of the old TwiML fallback, bringing paced streaming, backpressure-aware buffering, and proper barge-in queue clearing. The result: Meet participants hear a much snappier agent response with no awkward silent gaps when the AI is thinking.

A related fix ensures realtime.introMessage: "" is respected, so agents configured to join silently actually do.

File Transfer Plugin Now Bundled

A new bundled file-transfer plugin (#74742) adds four agent tools for binary file ops on paired remote nodes:

• file_fetch — download a remote file
• dir_list — list a directory
• dir_fetch — fetch an entire directory tree
• file_write — write a file to a paired node

The plugin ships with strict defaults: per-node path policy under plugins.entries.file-transfer.config.nodes requires explicit operator approval, symlink traversal is off by default (opt-in followSymlinks), and a 16 MB per-round-trip ceiling prevents runaway transfers. This makes remote file management safe enough to automate while keeping the blast radius small.

Unified Streaming Progress Drafts

A new streaming.mode: "progress" configuration lands across Discord, Telegram, Matrix, Slack, and Microsoft Teams simultaneously. Agents can now show live tool-call progress as a single updating draft message — with auto-generated single-word status labels — instead of a flood of individual updates.

Slack gets an additional streaming.progress.render: "rich" option that renders Block Kit progress cards with structured data rows. When Block Kit limits force a trim, the newest lines are preserved rather than the oldest.

A companion change introduces compact explain-mode tool summaries for /verbose mode and progress drafts by default. Operators who want raw tool output can set agents.defaults.toolProgressDetail: "raw".

Gateway Startup Is Noticeably Faster

Several rounds of startup optimization landed in this release:

• Model-catalog helpers, QR pairing code, and session lookup are now kept off hot import paths
• Non-readiness sidecars defer until after the ready signal fires
• The heavy cron runtime lazy-loads after the rest of gateway startup
• jiti (the TypeScript source-transform loader) is no longer imported on native-loadable plugin paths
• Bundled plugin metadata is fast-pathed on trusted plugins, skipping repeated cold scans (#77519, #77532)

The combined effect is a meaningfully faster default gateway cold start, especially on installs with several plugins.

/steer, /side, and More Agent Commands

A new /steer command (#76934) lets operators redirect the active run without starting a new turn when the session is idle — useful for nudging a long-running agent mid-task without fully interrupting it.

/side is now an alias for /btw side questions, giving a shorter path to asking the agent a side question while it works.

Channel Reliability Improvements

• Discord: degraded transport and gateway event-loop starvation now surface as actual status signals in openclaw channels status and openclaw status --deep (#76327), so intermittent socket resets stop looking like healthy operation
• WhatsApp: WhatsApp Channel/Newsletter targets are now supported for outbound messages
• Telegram: plugin-owned numeric forum-topic targets now work in the agent message tool
• Secrets: secrets apply now preserves keyRef and tokenRef fields so SecretRef metadata survives scrubbing
• Plugins: external channel plugins with artifacts in /dist/ (like @openclaw/discord since 2026.5.2) now correctly contribute SecretRef contracts at gateway startup

Control UI Refresh

The dashboard got several usability improvements: the active agent name appears in breadcrumbs without clutter, the New Job cron sidebar is now collapsible, the chat session picker has an agent-first filter, and the chat composer is responsive across phone/tablet/desktop widths. Consecutive duplicate messages (like heartbeat acknowledgements) now collapse into a single bubble with a count.

What Else

• openclaw models auth list [--provider] [--json] — inspect saved per-agent auth profiles without dumping secrets
• OpenRouter: opt-in response caching headers (X-OpenRouter-Cache) and expanded app-attribution categories
• Plugins/SDK: before_agent_finalize now supports bounded retry instructions so workflow plugins can request one more model pass
• doctor --fix: commits safe legacy migrations even when unrelated validation issues prevent full validation from passing

Full changelog: github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.5.4