Otto 0.2.12

New

• Join the Otto community on Discord. There's a Discord button beside Send feedback in the Chat sidebar, a "Join the Otto community" card in the welcome flow, a Getting started item on Home that ticks once you've opened it, and a command palette entry. Release news, questions and what other people are building live there: https://discord.gg/qZKACfT7Hc
• Rename a session. Right-click a session in the Sessions sidebar (or use the pencil that appears when you hover it) and give it a name that says what it's about, such as the business or project you're working on in that chat. The bot, its history and your other sessions stay as they are, and the name survives a restart. Contributed by onlinegill (issue #17).
• Settings has a sidebar, and a Connectors page. Every Settings page is now reachable from a list on the left; with the old row of tabs, the ones that didn't fit (Cloud and Mobile) couldn't be opened. Messaging (iMessage via Photon) and Mobile pairing now live together under Settings → Connectors, beside a new Telegram connector. Contributed by onlinegill.
• Talk to one of your Otto bots from Telegram. In Settings → Connectors → Telegram, paste a bot token from BotFather (it goes in your Mac's Keychain), pair your own Telegram chat with a one-time code that you approve on the Mac, and choose the one saved Otto bot Telegram may message. Messages from that chat go to the bot and its reply comes back; approvals and permission prompts stay in Otto on the Mac, and nothing sent from Telegram can grant them. A group can be approved too, limited to the member who paired it. Contributed by onlinegill.
• Local models are easier to set up. Pasting a bare address such as 192.168.1.20:8000/v1 works, Tailscale addresses (100.64.0.0/10) are accepted over plain HTTP, and a saved local model shows in the bot's model picker straight away, with a shortcut in the bot editor to add or edit it. A bot whose older provider session file has gone now starts a fresh one instead of failing every prompt; its conversation is kept. Contributed by onlinegill.
• Pi is a harness you can run agents and bots on. Pi (pi.dev) is a small open-source coding agent that works with whichever model providers you sign into. Install it with npm install -g @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent, run pi once in Terminal and sign in with /login, and it appears beside Claude Code, Codex and the others when you start a session, hire a bot or build an automation. Otto reads Pi's live model list, streams its work into the chat, resumes sessions, and gives it Otto's tools through a .pi/mcp.json in the workspace. Pi has no approval prompts of its own, so Read only limits it to inspection tools, while Workspace and Unrestricted run with Pi's normal tools.

Fixes

• Unrestricted agents no longer wait for browser click approvals. With an agent in Unrestricted (bypass) mode, clicking in the Otto browser still queued an approval card that nobody needed to answer. Bypass now covers browser clicks as well as the provider's own tool permissions, from the first run and when you change the mode mid-session; turning bypass off brings the approvals back. Account access in the browser still asks every time.
• Otto no longer counts a second running copy as a crash. Opening Otto while it was already running, or a helper starting a session while the app was up, was recorded in diagnostics as an abnormal exit. The session marker now names its process, and only a marker left by a process that has gone counts as a crash. Reported with the fix shape by mattabate (issue #23).
• Builds with Xcode 26.5. One expression in the welcome view took the Swift 6.3.2 compiler too long to type-check. Contributed by pat-dubois.

Otto 0.2.11

New

• Run Otto Harness bots on a local model. In Settings → Models choose "Local (OpenAI compatible)" and point Otto at Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM or any server that speaks the OpenAI Chat Completions API. The API key is optional and stays in Otto's secure credential store; plain HTTP is accepted only for this Mac and private-network addresses. Contributed by onlinegill.
• Android companion app, as source. Apps/OttoAndroidApp is a native Android app that pairs with your Mac over a private HTTPS address and shows your sessions and bots. It is built from source or from the "Android companion APK" GitHub workflow; it is not part of the Mac download. Contributed by onlinegill.

Otto 0.2.10

Fixes

• Otto opens on Macs with no working audio output. Otto set up its voice playback audio while launching, and on a Mac whose speakers or output device were missing or reported an unusable format the app closed before its first window appeared. Voice audio is now set up only when you first use voice, and any audio problem shows as a voice error instead of stopping Otto from opening.

Otto 0.2.9

Fixes

• The sidebar and thinking steps look as they did before 0.2.8. Version 0.2.8 put a dark tint behind the sidebar and a box around an agent's thinking and tool steps on themes with artwork. That changed the look of those themes, so it's been removed. The terminal and header readability fixes from 0.2.8 are unchanged.

Otto 0.2.8

Fixes

• Approval requests stay on screen until you answer them. In Ask to approve mode, the approval card could flash up and vanish while the agent kept waiting, leaving it stuck. It now stays until you click Approve or Deny, for chats and bots alike, and the agent carries on as soon as you do. Questions an agent asks you stay put the same way.
• No more approval cards that can't be answered. An agent's own message that happened to mention an approval could show up as a card where Approve did nothing. Those false cards no longer appear, and if one ever does, Approve or Deny now clears it.
• Text is readable on every theme. Terminal output from agents is adjusted to stay readable against your theme, so white text on light themes and black text on dark ones no longer disappear. The sidebar, activity notes and tool steps get a soft backing over theme artwork, and header icons and buttons hold their contrast too.

New

• Rename, move or delete a space. Open the space menu and choose Manage spaces to rename a space, point it at a different folder, or delete it. Deleting moves Otto's own data for that space to the Trash and never touches your files. You can't delete or move the space you're in, so switch to another one first.

Otto 0.2.7

Fixes

• Otto opens on macOS 15 again. Otto 0.2.6 closed straight away at launch on macOS Sequoia because a system library it needs wasn't included in the download. It's now bundled with the app, and release checks catch any library that's missing.

Otto 0.2.6

Fixes

• Log in links open in a Browser tab. Clicking a website's "Log in" link (such as HeyReach's) now opens the login page as a tab inside Otto instead of a separate window. Sign-in windows that a site opens itself, such as "Continue with Google", still open separately so they can finish signing you in.

Otto 0.2.5

New

• Switch spaces with Option–Tab. Hold Option and tap Tab to cycle through your recently used spaces, then release Option to switch. Tap once to return to your previous space, or add Shift to cycle backwards. The switcher shows each space’s icon and name; Escape cancels.
• Keep work running as you switch. The keyboard switcher uses Otto’s existing space navigation, keeping running agents, drafts and each space’s state in place. The shortcuts are listed in Settings → Shortcuts.

Otto 0.2.4

New

• See which account is signed in. Provider accounts show their signed-in identity, making it easier to choose the right account for agents and automations.
• Paste images into Home. Add screenshots and other images directly to the Home message box, with attachment previews before you send.

Changes

• Fresh spaces start clean, without sample chats or demo sessions.
• Routine commands stay out of your tabs. Background agent commands no longer add terminal tabs to Chat's work drawer. Open a terminal explicitly when you want to see it; commands waiting for your input remain easy to find.
• Pin your favourite sites more easily. The Browser now has a visible pin/unpin button, and saved shortcuts scroll so every pinned site stays reachable.

Fixes

• More website buttons open in Browser tabs. JavaScript buttons such as Zodiac's boat configurator now open a tab inside Otto. Sign-in windows keep the connection they need to complete authentication.
• Google account switches stay in the current tab. Switching between Gmail accounts or between Calendar accounts reuses that product's tab. Opening a different Google app still opens a separate tab.
• Back navigation blocks old start-page URLs. The Browser rejects legacy Muse start-page addresses during history navigation and skips internal pages when using Back or Forward.

Otto 0.2.3

New

• A calmer place to start. A new chat now opens on a quiet welcome: a small Otto who follows your cursor and blinks, a greeting for the time of day, the message box in the middle of the screen, and a few suggestions (Brief me on today, Draft a doc, Research a website, Automate something). In a code project you get coding suggestions instead. It scales with your window, and once you send a message the chat goes back to normal.
• Your bots are part of Otto's family. Bots now look like Otto: his shape in their own colour, wearing one accessory for their job (glasses, headset, hard hat, beret or antenna). Their eyes show what they're up to: glancing up while working, crossed when something went wrong and closed when offline. Pick a different look in the bot editor; photos and emoji you chose yourself are kept.
• Bring a bot into any chat. The new-chat screen shows your bots under "Bring in". Hover to see who's who, and click one to @mention it.
• Videos go fullscreen in the Browser, and file upload buttons on websites now open a file picker.

Changes

• Switching spaces keeps everything running. Moving between your spaces no longer restarts Otto: agents keep working, and drafts stay where you left them.
• Terminals live in the work drawer. Agent and bot terminals sit in the panel on the right of Chat instead of a separate page, and the drawer only opens when you choose to look.
• Links that open a new window now open as a Browser tab inside Otto, instead of in another browser.
• "Always allow" applies straight away. Choosing Always allow on an approval now covers the run that's already going, and is remembered for that bot.

Fixes

• Bots no longer open blank. If a bot's conversation lost its place, Otto now reopens the saved conversation instead of an empty chat.
• Fixed a rare freeze when waiting work was cancelled.