OpenClaw dropped a hefty pre-release late Friday: v2026.5.9-beta.1, tagged at 13:32 UTC on May 9th. It lands hours after the v2026.5.7 stable release and packs enough changes to warrant a full deep-dive on its own. If you run a Discord-connected OpenClaw instance — or you're a heavy Bedrock or Gemini user — you'll want to read this one before the stable tag arrives.
Discord Voice Goes Multi-Modal
The headline feature is a ground-up rework of Discord voice channel support. OpenClaw now ships three distinct realtime voice modes:
- agent-proxy (new default) — Voice acts as the microphone and speaker extension of your routed OpenClaw agent session. The agent brain stays fully in the loop; voice is just the I/O layer.
- stt-tts — Classic speech-to-text in, text-to-speech out. Still available as an explicit fallback when latency is more important than agent depth.
- bidi realtime — Full bidirectional realtime session via
openclaw_agent_consult. This mode routes through the OpenAI realtime bridge, keeps consults quiet while the supervisor agent is thinking, and accepts Codex-style conversation events end-to-end.
Alongside the mode split, the team improved voice capture quality significantly. The default post-speech silence grace period was extended to 2.5 seconds (configurable via voice.captureSilenceGraceMs), which should eliminate most choppy captures in active Discord servers. The /vc command also gained new diagnostics — you can now run openclaw channels status --probe to catch missing Connect, Speak, or Read Message History permissions before joining a channel.
Barge-in behavior got smarter too. A new voice.realtime.minBargeInAudioEndMs option lets high-echo rooms opt out of immediate barge-in cuts while lower-echo setups keep the snappy 0ms default.
Amazon Bedrock Service Tiers
Enterprise OpenClaw operators get a long-requested feature: serviceTier support for Bedrock models. Valid values are default, flex, priority, and reserved, and they can be set globally via agents.defaults.params.serviceTier or per-model in agents.defaults.models. This maps directly to Bedrock's cross-region inference profiles and lets teams carve out dedicated throughput for production agents. Thanks to @mobilinkd for the PR.
Gemini 3.1 Migration
OpenClaw is retiring google/gemini-3-pro-preview in favor of the canonical google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview ID. The update touches five separate normalization paths — provider catalog resolution, proxy-provider IDs, dynamic model resolution, onboarding alias maps, and doctor --fix recovery — so the migration should be transparent for most users.
If you're on a Kilo-style configured catalog or a custom provider entry using the old Gemini 3 Pro ID, run openclaw config validate after updating. The recovery docs for Codex OAuth routing (updated alongside) are at docs.openclaw.ai/providers/openai.
The oc-path Plugin
A new optional bundled plugin — oc-path — shows up in this beta. It adds the openclaw path command for surgical oc:// access to Markdown, JSONC, and JSONL workspace files. Think of it as a lightweight file-addressing layer that lets agents reference specific workspace documents without needing full exec access. It ships off by default and requires an explicit install.
Unified Model Catalog
The plugin SDK now includes a unified model catalog registration surface covering text, image, video, and music providers in a single providerCatalogEntry manifest format. This underpins the live catalog caching and per-model video capability overlays that have been landing across the last several releases. For plugin authors, the new presentation helpers for controls-only interactive rendering mean you can build richer channel UIs without duplicating native card logic.
/think default and /fast default
A small quality-of-life addition from @VACInc: /think default and /fast default commands now clear session-level reasoning overrides and fall back to your configured or provider default. Previously you had to restart the session to drop a manual /think override.
Control UI: Session History Rollups
The Control UI picks up transcript-backed historical lineage rollups for sessions that have rotated. You can now toggle between current-instance usage and full historical-lineage scope, with long-range presets — fixing the long-standing issue (#50701) where usage history disappeared after gateway restarts.
Node 22.16+ Floor
The supported Node 22 floor is now 22.16+, required for the node:sqlite statement metadata API. Node 24 remains the recommendation. If you're pinned to an older Node 22 minor, this is your nudge to upgrade before the stable release lands.
Install the Beta
npm install -g openclaw@2026.5.9-beta.1
Or pull the Docker image tagged beta. This is a pre-release — test it in a non-production environment first. The full changelog is on GitHub.