v2.6.0: Meet Nova, Your Voice Assistant Now Has a Name and Knows Who It Is Talking To

Your AI employee has been able to talk for a while now. What it did not have was a name. That sounds like a cosmetic detail, and half of this release is exactly that, but naming the voice turned out to change how it behaves too. Meet Nova.

The voice has a name now

The voice assistant is called Nova everywhere it shows up. It introduces itself as Nova, the panel title says Nova, the launch button reads "Talk to Nova," the settings header is "Nova settings," and the modal that appears when it is unavailable says so as Nova. One name, used consistently, so there is a thing to point at when you say "ask Nova to read that back."

This matters more than branding tidiness. A voice with a name is a voice you build a habit around. "Let me check with the assistant" is a sentence you forget. "Ask Nova" is one you say twice a day.

Nova knows who it is talking to

Here is the part that is not cosmetic. Nova's system prompt now includes the connected user's first and last name, resolved the same way chat messages already are, plus a flag for whether that person is the owner or an authorized user.

The practical effect is that Nova addresses the right person and, critically, never assumes a non-owner is the owner. If someone other than you is talking to your AI employee, Nova knows it, and it does not hand out owner-level familiarity to a guest. It still gets the employee's full profile as context, the first 6000 characters of the CLAUDE.md that defines who the employee is, so the personality you set up carries into the voice channel intact. Same employee, same character, now with the right sense of who is in the room.

Set the pace

Everyone has a different tolerance for how fast a machine should talk. There is a new speech rate slider in Nova settings, running from 0.70 up to 1.35, defaulting to 1.15, which is a hair quicker than natural because most people want their assistant to get to the point.

The setting is saved per user in the database, so your pace is your pace, not a global default someone else picked. Nudge it down if you are parsing dense information, push it up once you know the cadence and want to move faster.

No more reading punctuation out loud

Anyone who has had a text-to-speech engine say "star star important star star" knows the specific irritation this fixes. Nova now strips markup and special characters, the asterisks, hashes, underscores, backticks, tildes, and the rest, before it speaks. You get the sentence, not a recitation of the formatting.

The guard is purely on what gets read aloud. The underlying system prompt is left untouched, so nothing about how Nova reasons changes. It just stops narrating the symbols that were only ever meant for your eyes.

Sensible handling for how you are set up

Nova adapts to your deployment instead of showing you controls that do not apply. In SaaS mode there is only the pro model, so the model selector is simply hidden and settings show just the thinking level. Fewer knobs, no dead options.

In bring-your-own-key mode without an OpenRouter key connected, the launch button still works and opens a modal that actually helps. If you are the owner or admin, it explains where to set the key and gives you a "Take me there" button that deep-links straight into the dashboard, opens the API key panel, and scrolls right to the OpenRouter section. If you are another user on the instance, it tells you to reach out to your admin rather than leaving you poking at a setting you cannot change.

The small stuff that makes it feel finished

A few rough edges got sanded down. The mute button now holds its position at center, and the Stop button no longer shoves it aside, so you stop mis-hitting Stop when you meant to mute. The right panel has a single, clearly labeled close button at the Nova title level, and the confusing duplicate X is gone. And saving a setting now gives you a "Nova settings saved" toast, debounced so that dragging a slider fires one confirmation instead of a dozen.

None of these are headline features. All of them are the difference between a tool that works and one that feels considered.

That is v2.6.0. The voice you already had is now Nova: it knows your name, knows whether you own the account, talks at the pace you set, and stops reading punctuation at you. Small release, but the voice channel just went from a feature to a colleague you can call by name.

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