KITT (Knight Rider, 1982, Glen A. Larson) — the Knight Industries Two Thousand, a car-bound AI you simply talk to: it holds a conversation by voice and deploys a deep bag of specialized functions on command. This release gives Curia the same — a voice you speak with, new channels to reach it through, and a real toolkit of skills it draws on when asked.
The headline: Curia has a voice. You can open a call from the console and just talk to it — duplex audio over self-hosted LiveKit, with Deepgram turning your speech into text, Cartesia speaking the reply, and barge-in so you can cut in mid-sentence. Join, mute, and hang up right from chat; when you drop off, the call ends and the room is torn down (calls carry a one-hour token). A LiveKit Compose sample and an operator security/privacy guide get you set up. Under the hood, Anthropic and OpenRouter now stream tokens and tool calls as they happen — the primitive the whole voice loop runs on.
More ways to reach it. Two new channels landed alongside voice: Slack (Socket Mode DMs, @mentions, and in-thread replies) and SMS (two-way texting over a Telnyx office number). Both can send 1:1 messages on your behalf — and a 👍/👎 reaction on Slack or Signal now resolves a pending approval without a word typed.
A real skills toolkit. The execution layer split cleanly into tools (the individual actions) and skills (bundles of tools plus instructions). You can pin a whole bundle, a single tool, or even a connected MCP server projected as a skill, and Curia activates a skill's tools and guidance at runtime when it needs them. Unmodified Anthropic SKILL.md folders can be dropped straight in.
Console & contacts. The workspace stub gave way to real settings pages — Personality, Ghostwriting, Posture, Autonomy, Memory, and System — and the console home now greets you with health, attention, and activity cards plus a chat shortcut. You can add, verify, retire, or merge a contact's channel identities from the console or API; verifying your own Slack or Signal teaches Curia to recognize you on the way out.
Sturdier under load. Audit logging gained a Phase-1 hardening pass — structured columns, a sequence-ordered hash chain, an archivable LLM-call log with a kill switch, and authorization-decision logging. And a database outage no longer takes Curia down silently: it surfaces a clear DATABASE_UNAVAILABLE error, times out cleanly, retries, and pings you if the database stays down for five minutes.
Fixes & security. Voice reliability got a thorough shake-out — clean call teardown on synthesis errors, safer session cleanup, and a required Cartesia voice credential so calls aren't silently mute. A batch of dependencies were pinned or upgraded to clear known path-traversal, XSS, and denial-of-service advisories.
It learns to listen—
speech becomes text becomes thought.
It answers. Out loud.