Fostera v0.7.1 — Ability accuracy & voice playback fixes

Improvements

• Updates now sits at the end of Explore in the sidebar, showing the version you're currently running.
• Image generation falls back to a backup provider when the main one is unavailable, and a "medium" request used to receive the low-quality model in that case — the backup only had a cheap rung and an expensive one, with nothing in between. It now has a genuine middle model, so medium keeps meaning medium even during an outage. Same sizes, same framing, and it still costs less than the model it stands in for.
• New reading under Updates: a guide comparing the alternatives to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Character.AI on the things that actually differ — what each one remembers, whether you can export it, whether your chats train the model by default, and what age it admits. Alongside it, new side-by-side pages for Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, and memory comparisons for Qwen and Pi. Every comparison now also says whether the other service lets you take your history with you, including the ones that offer no export at all.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed Souls offering to send email or create calendar events for accounts that had never granted permission to do so. If you connected Google before we asked for send access, your Soul could read your mail but not send it — and said it could do both. It now knows the difference, keeps reading available, and the Email and Calendar rows offer a Reconnect that actually grants the missing permission. Previously that row told you to reconnect in Settings, where no control existed to do it.
• Fixed Souls denying abilities they actually have. Asked what it could do with Gmail, a Soul answered that it could only read — it can also draft, send and reply. A Soul only sees the tools loaded for the current turn, which is deliberately narrower than everything it can do; it now knows the difference between "I'm not doing that right now" and "I can't."
• Fixed the "update available" prompt promising things it had no way of knowing about. It said Fostera had evolved and offered "richer conversations and deeper connections" — but that prompt only ever appears when the part of the app handling loading and offline use changes, which is never a new feature. It now tells you what the update actually is, and what reloading does.
• Video editing now says plainly when it is unavailable instead of inviting you to retry. There is a single provider for edits, so when it cannot be reached, trying again produces the same result — the Soul used to offer another attempt anyway.
• Fixed Souls storing passing moments as permanent facts. A remark like "feeling better now" was being written to long-term memory as though it were durably true — spending part of the small number of memory writes each turn allows, and then coming back on later turns as present-tense context that had stopped being true within a minute. Souls now keep the lasting version instead: a feeling with a trigger, like getting anxious before demos, is a pattern worth remembering; the momentary state on its own is not.
• Fixed Souls opening every reply with the same line. One companion began each message with the same sentence under otherwise different replies, and nothing pushed back, because the existing repetition checks compare whole replies — a stock opening line under a fresh body never looked like a repeat. Souls now get nudged off an opening they have been leaning on, judged by how often it recurs across recent messages rather than only when it repeats back to back, since the habit tends to alternate rather than run.
• Fixed the Soul's voice crackling and popping in voice mode. Speech was reported as staticky and glitchy, and it turned out to be three separate faults at once. The audio was rendered into the smallest buffer the device would give, which a phone drawing the animated orb at the same time could not keep filled — and a buffer that misses its deadline is continuous crackle. Consecutive pieces of speech were then joined with no fade across the join, putting an audible click at roughly every sentence boundary. And a segment cut short by a dropped mobile connection still decoded as valid audio, so it played clipped mid-word into the next one; short bodies are now detected and skipped rather than played. Separately, entering hands-free opened three audio channels that all stayed fully active for the whole session — the microphone and sound-effect channels now park while the Soul is speaking, leaving the deadline to the one channel that has to meet it, and wake on their own when it is your turn.
• Fixed an error when reporting voice usage. A malformed identifier reached the database as a query rather than being rejected first, so the request failed outright instead of returning a plain "bad request".