OpenClaw 4.22: more models, voice, and a terminal that doesn't need the gateway

OpenClaw 4.22 adds two major model providers (Tencent Hy3 and xAI’s full suite), gives agents a voice, and introduces a terminal mode that works without the Gateway. The Telegram situation, however, remains messy.

Source: Reddit r/myclaw, GitHub, Tencent, xAI

TL;DR

OpenClaw 4.22 is a practical, no-reinvention release: more models with fewer setup steps, voice capabilities via xAI, and a local TUI that cuts the Gateway dependency for terminal users. The new features are solid, but recurring Telegram bugs continue to erode user trust.

Where we’re headed

If you’ve been waiting for OpenClaw to feel less like configuring infrastructure and more like using a tool, this release is a step in that direction. We’ll walk through what’s new in models, voice, and terminal workflow, then dig into the fixes and the one sore spot that the community won’t stop talking about: Telegram reliability.

The story

New models: Tencent Hy3 and xAI’s full arsenal

The headline addition is Tencent Hy3 Preview (Hunyuan 3.0) via TokenHub. It’s a 295B MoE model with 21B active parameters during inference and a 256K context window, released under an open-source license. For anyone tracking the open model landscape, Hy3 is Tencent’s most ambitious open-source effort, and it competes directly with the best MoE architectures available right now.

Tencent open-sourced Hy3 on April 23, 2026, a day before the OpenClaw 4.22 release. Also known as Hunyuan 3.0, it was announced as the company's most powerful open-source model. The 256K context window puts it in direct competition with Kimi K2.5 and other leading long-context models.

On the xAI side, the integration is even broader. OpenClaw 4.22 adds:

Image generation via grok-imagine-image and grok-imagine-image-pro, including reference-image edits
6 TTS voices with output in MP3, WAV, PCM, and G.711
grok-stt for speech-to-text
Real-time transcription for Voice Calls

xAI launched its standalone STT/TTS APIs on April 17, 2026. These are built on the same audio stack powering Grok Voice in Tesla vehicles and Starlink support. The standalone release marks an important step for the xAI ecosystem, which had previously kept voice capabilities confined within the Grok app.

Deepgram, ElevenLabs, and Mistral also join as streaming STT providers for Voice Calls, expanding options for conversational mode.

Local TUI: terminal chat without the Gateway

This might be the most requested feature for anyone running OpenClaw on servers. The embedded TUI mode lets you start a chat directly from the command line, no Gateway required. It reduces setup complexity for remote machines and quick testing.

Plugin approval gates stay enforced, so you don’t lose security for convenience. A reasonable trade-off that fits OpenClaw’s philosophy: easier use without sacrificing control.

Smoother onboarding and models from chat

Two changes that cut down on friction:

Auto-install of missing plugins during setup: if a required plugin is absent, OpenClaw installs it instead of throwing an error
The /models add command: register new models from chat without restarting the Gateway or editing config files

A community member already found a practical use case:

“If you want to try GPT-5.5 through OpenAI Codex, upgrade to the latest OpenClaw first, then just run: /models add openai-codex gpt-5.5.”

Fewer manual steps, more time using agents instead of configuring them.

GPT-5.5 is accessible through the OpenAI Codex provider on OpenClaw. The `/models add openai-codex gpt-5.5` command registers the model without a Gateway restart, making new model adoption nearly instantaneous.

GPT-5 and the shared prompt overlay

The release adds a shared prompt overlay system for all GPT-5 providers. The agents.defaults.promptOverlays.gpt5.personality parameter works as a global toggle to customize GPT-5 behavior regardless of provider. If you’re using GPT-5 through OpenAI, Azure, and OpenRouter, you no longer need separate overlays for each.

Everything else: WhatsApp, sessions, diagnostics, and fixes

This release is dense with cross-cutting improvements:

WhatsApp: native reply quoting, plus per-group and per-direct systemPrompt with wildcard support. Useful for managing bots across multiple conversations with different personalities.
Sessions: filters for label, agent, and free-text search, auto-derived titles, and last-message previews. Quality-of-life changes you feel when working with dozens of active conversations.
Control UI: personal operator identity with name and local avatar. Makes it clearer who’s operating when multiple people interact with the same agents.
Diagnostics export: generates a package with sanitized logs, status, config, and stability info, ready to attach to a bug report. If you’ve ever been asked to “send the logs,” you’ll appreciate this.
ACPX: openClawToolsMcpBridge for injecting OpenClaw tools into an ACP context, Pi embedded adds an extension factory for async runtime hooks, Codex completes the lifecycle hook set, Claude CLI adopts warm stdio by default and resumes sessions after Gateway restart.
Tokenjuice: compacts exec/bash results in Pi embedded runs, reducing context consumption. A silent fix that makes a difference on long sessions.

For the technically curious

From here on, we get into the fixes and the Telegram situation. If you just care about the new features, skip to the takeaway.

Fixes

Several of these had lingered for months:

Thinking default raised to medium for reasoning models. Previously off/low, meaning models designed to think weren’t being allowed to think. A wrong default, finally corrected.
OpenRouter/LiteLLM pricing now fetched asynchronously with a 30-second timeout. No more infinite hangs while the system figures out model costs.
Session daily reset fixed: it was deleting active conversations. The headaches this caused are hard to overstate.
Plugins install now automatically adds to the allow list.
Models/auth: fix for re-auth that wiped out other providers. A subtle bug that could make working providers inaccessible.
Memory search: fix for sqlite-vec KNN result limits.
OpenAI-compatible: fix for token accounting across vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, LM Studio, and other backends.

The Telegram problem

Forum metadata caching now has an expiry, which should reduce stale data. But the community isn’t convinced that’s enough.

One user put it plainly:

“Again todays update breaks my telegram, again! wtf”

It’s not isolated. Since version 4.2, numerous GitHub issues have documented Telegram channels failing silently: no visible errors, but messages don’t get delivered. Issues #60400, #60185, #61273, #61195, and #60646 are just the visible tip.

Telegram bugs in OpenClaw have a long and painful history. Since version 4.2, multiple GitHub issues document channels that fail without reporting errors. The problem is particularly insidious because it manifests as apparent silence: the bot seems to work, but messages don't reach their destination. The forum metadata caching introduced in 4.22 mitigates some symptoms, but the community is calling for a deeper fix that addresses Telegram connection management at its root.

The cache expiry in 4.22 is a step in the right direction, but many users feel the problem needs more radical intervention. When an update that adds features breaks something as basic as message delivery, the damage to trust is real.

The takeaway

Key points:

OpenClaw 4.22 adds Hy3 and xAI voice/image APIs, expanding the model roster significantly
The local TUI mode removes the Gateway dependency for terminal-based workflows
Onboarding improvements (auto-install, /models add) cut configuration friction
Telegram reliability remains a structural problem that incremental fixes haven’t solved

New features are welcome, but the community is right to insist that message delivery on the most-used channel should work before more gets layered on top.

Sources:

Reddit r/myclaw (reddit.com/r/myclaw)
GitHub OpenClaw releases (github.com/openclaw/openclaw)
Tencent Hy3 / Hunyuan 3.0 (hy3ai.com)
xAI Docs (docs.x.ai)
MarkTechPost (marktechpost.com)