botcage v0.4.0
What's new in 0.4.0
Channels. Bots no longer live only in their own one-to-one chat.
A channel is a room with several of them and you in it. Type @ and
it offers whoever is present; @everyone reaches all of them and only
you can use it. A message with nobody named is addressed to the room,
and the room decides who answers. Pin a message, or pull one aside
into a thread — a message that has a thread says so where it was sent.
Channels and bots carry an unread dot, and a brighter badge when one
of them tagged you by name.
Calls. Hold to talk and a bot answers out loud. Group calls are
laid out like a voice channel, with the tile of whoever has the floor
lit and mouths that move with the sound rather than at random. Ask one
bot something by name and only that bot answers, spoken names included.
Voices that stay. Speech and hearing both run on your machine —
Kyutai's Pocket TTS and whisper.cpp, fetched on first use and offered
during setup. Every bot gets its own voice, and the same one after a
restart: a bot sounding like itself is part of it being a colleague
rather than a text box.
Stand-ups. A routine can now be a stand-up rather than an
instruction: every bot in the channel takes a turn. None of them is
asked how their week went — each is handed what actually ran, what it
said, what broke and what is next on its clock, and reports that. A
bot with nothing to report says so.
Routines that report into a channel, and a bot that can put work
on a colleague's calendar. One calendar view for every bot at once,
under your own avatar.
Linux. Voices that make a sound, a microphone the webview will
actually hand over, and a build that works.
The phone app learned about channels and threads.
Which file do I want?
| You have | Download |
|---|---|
| Mac, Apple silicon (M1–M4) | botcage_*_aarch64.dmg |
| Mac, Intel | botcage_*_x64.dmg |
| Debian, Ubuntu, Mint | botcage_*_amd64.deb |
| Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE | botcage-*.x86_64.rpm |
| Any other Linux | botcage_*_amd64.AppImage |
Not sure which Mac you have? → menu → About This Mac. Anything with
an M-series chip takes the aarch64 build.
Before it will run
botcage needs the Claude Code CLI installed and signed in — it
drives that rather than shipping a model of its own:
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code # then: claudeA Claude Pro or Max subscription covers it. Everything else — chat,
memory, routines, connectors, plugins — works with nothing further.
Giving a bot its own computer
Optional, and off by default. Switch on Own computer in a bot's
settings and botcage sets up a container engine itself. The Linux
desktop it runs is built on first use and takes a few minutes.
The phone app
Not in this release. botcage has an iOS and Android client that
reaches your laptop directly, but neither ships here — an iPhone
has no install path for a file attached to a release, and the
Android build is not something to hand out signed with a debug key.
Build either from mobile/.