v1.0.0-beta

v1.0.0-beta

Released June 23, 2026

Chalie reaches its 1.0 beta — a brand-new Vue 3 interface, image understanding, interactive web browsing, proactive background research, and a substantially expanded Brain admin console.

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🎨 A Brand-New Interface

• Rebuilt From the Ground Up: Both the chat app and the Brain admin console have been rewritten as fast, modern apps with full dark and light theme support throughout.
• Watch It Work, Step by Step: As Chalie works through a task, each step appears live as its own reply with its activity beneath it; completed steps fold into a tidy summary you can expand. Refreshing the page rebuilds the same view, so reviewing a past answer looks like watching it happen.
• In Sync Everywhere: Open Chalie on more than one device or tab and your messages and its replies appear on all of them at once, so the conversation stays in lockstep.
• Listen to a Whole Answer: The speak button now plays back an entire turn as one continuous narration instead of reading a single message at a time.

👁️ Chalie Can See

• Image Understanding: Upload a photo, screenshot, or scan and ask about it — Chalie describes what's in it, reads text inside it, and remembers it. Pick which provider handles vision, and Chalie verifies a model can truly see before trusting it with images.
• Find Pictures by What They Show: Every uploaded image gets a detailed description that's indexed for search, so you can later find a picture by its contents — objects, colours, text, layout — not just its filename.
• Vision for Any Model: Even a model with no built-in vision can read an image, routed through your chosen vision provider, with a local text-in-image fallback when none is set.

🌐 Real Web Browsing

• Hands-On, Not Just Reading: Chalie now drives a real browser — it can open a page, click buttons and links, fill and submit forms, scroll, go back, and work through multi-step flows, keeping the page open between steps.
• Screenshots It Can Actually See: Chalie can capture a page and inspect the screenshot with its own vision, and the screenshot is saved as a document you can ask about again later.

🔗 Connect to Any MCP Server

• Reach Out to Remote Tools: Chalie can now connect outward to remote MCP servers and use their tools, managed from a dedicated Inbound / Outbound section in the Brain — add, edit, test, enable, and disable servers in a few clicks.
• Safe and Self-Maintaining: Remote tools obey the same per-channel Allow / Ask / Deny permissions as built-in ones, duplicate servers are merged automatically, and a background heartbeat keeps each server's tool list fresh and its status accurate.

🧠 Memory That Learns and Forgets

• Memories Age Naturally: Each memory carries its own relevance clock — recent moments stay vivid, consolidated knowledge lasts far longer, and stale, weak, or superseded memories eventually fade away on their own, so recall stays fresh instead of drowning in old junk.
• It Organizes Itself: Once enough has accumulated, related memories are grouped and rolled up into higher-level summaries automatically, with no manual curation — and when Chalie learns something that contradicts an old fact, the old one is retired cleanly so it stops resurfacing.
• Knows Where It Came From: Memories are weighted by their source — your own words carry the most weight, while background and automated activity is tuned down — so what you tell Chalie directly shapes what it remembers.
• Picks Up Where You Left Off: A new conversation opens with a quiet, curated recollection of the most relevant facts and recent moments, and you can pin a reply to keep it verbatim forever — never rewritten, never decayed.

🔬 Thinks While You Rest

• Proactive Research: A new background mind quietly researches topics it expects to matter to you, surfacing what it finds when it becomes relevant — and you can review exactly what it explored in a new Auto Research view in the Brain.
• Learns Facts on Its Own: A background reflection step reads your recent conversations and proposes durable facts, updates, and corrections, so Chalie's understanding grows passively without you ever saying 'remember this'.

🃏 Rich Cards That Stick Around

• Durable Tool Cards: The visual cards Chalie shows — weather, timers, lists, articles, and more — are now saved properly, so they stay intact when you scroll back through your history instead of collapsing into plain text, and they show up correctly even when produced partway through a longer answer.
• Always Live, Never Stale: Chalie no longer answers time-sensitive questions — weather, news, prices, schedules — from memory; it checks a live source that turn.

🛡️ Smarter, Safer Permissions

• One Clear Set of Rules: Permissions are now a single, readable list across three contexts — you in chat, Chalie's own background work, and other agents — each action set to Allow, Ask, or Deny, with header buttons to set a whole context at once.
• Shell Commands Judged by What They Do: A command is classified by what it actually does, not by a label the model picks, so a destructive command can't wave itself through by calling itself harmless. Read-only commands run freely; the rest ask first.
• Safe by Default: Sensitive actions are pre-set to deny in background and external contexts where no human is watching, anything unknown defaults to asking first, and your existing choices carry over automatically on upgrade.

💾 Full Backup & Restore

• Whole-Instance Import/Export: An Import / Export section in the Brain snapshots your entire Chalie — memory, documents, skills, and settings — into a single file you can save anywhere, optionally encrypted with an AES-256 password.
• Safe to Restore: Restoring does a careful, checksum-verified wipe-and-replace that rolls back automatically if anything goes wrong mid-swap, so a half-finished restore can never corrupt a running instance.

🔌 Easier Provider Setup

• Guided Setup Wizard: Adding an AI provider is now a step-by-step flow — pick from a curated catalog of popular providers, and Chalie pre-fills the connection details, fetches the real model list to choose from, and only asks for an API key when one is actually needed.
• Pick a Provider for Background Work: A Delegate setting lets you choose which provider handles Chalie's background research and web browsing, separate from your main chat provider.

📍 Location Awareness

• Named Places: Save the places that matter — home, office, the gym — and refer to them by name, with conversations tagged by where they happened.
• Departure Reminders: Ask Chalie to remind you of something when it's time to leave a place, with a sensible warning buffer before you need to go.

⚙️ Reliability Under the Hood

• Long Conversations Don't Break: When a conversation outgrows the model's limits, Chalie distils older history into a running summary and carries it forward, so who you are and what you're in the middle of survives instead of being silently dropped — and it does this work while you're away so your next message comes back faster.
• Failures Tell the Truth: Every built-in tool now reports a real error when something goes wrong instead of returning a plausible-but-wrong answer, so Chalie can self-correct or honestly tell you it couldn't do something.
• Self-Healing Connection: Chalie detects when a live connection has quietly gone dead — even when the network never signals a drop — and reconnects on its own, so the chat keeps working without a manual refresh.
• Smoother and Steadier: Faster, more reliable file search; a firm limit on how long any single model request can hang so a stuck call no longer freezes a turn; and a quicker, more dependable startup.