What’s new in Krovi.

From a shelf to a more capable companion.

New in v0.3 Four new tools, speech that works in any app, ten themes and an optional AI key of your own. Still no account, no sync and no subscription. Some of it has been checked by automated tests, the browser demo and the written audit rather than traced on a wire or on every desktop; the network audit says exactly which.

New in v0.3

• 19 tools. Agent, Circle to Ask, Clean My OS and Extras join the 15 of v0.2. Extras gathers a quick launcher, snippets, file organiser rules, workflows and a local search by name.
• Agent Mode. Type a sentence; a built-in planner on your PC turns it into steps. Safe steps run, and steps that schedule something, open an unfamiliar address or prepare an email wait on a card for your OK. Krovi never sends email: it opens a draft in your mail app. Steps it cannot do are shown as “Not run” with the reason. MCP servers can be recorded in a registry, but Krovi does not start or contact them yet. An optional Talk to Agent shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+A, off until you turn it on) lets you hold a key and speak: local Whisper turns your words into text for Agent Mode, and steps that need approval still show their cards.
• Circle to Ask and screen awareness. A shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+C) lets you drag around part of the screen; Krovi reads just that area once, on your PC, and the picture is not saved. Screen awareness is separate: you start it, it lasts 5 to 30 minutes, an indicator stays visible, and the screen is read only when you press Ask.
• Dictation into any app. Hold or toggle a shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+D by default) and your speech is typed where your cursor is. Recognition runs on your PC with Whisper; there is no cloud speech service. You choose a model size, downloaded once from Hugging Face with its checksum verified. Needs a CPU with AVX2 (2013 or newer).
• Clean My OS. Scan for temporary files, caches, crash dumps and old installers; review every path and size; move what you tick to the Recycle Bin after a confirmation. Recent files are left alone, shortcuts are not followed, and Krovi never asks for administrator rights.
• Read aloud settings. A section in Settings to choose the Windows voice and speed, and to preview it.
• Four new themes. Obsidian, Linen, Voxel and Pixel Meadow, for ten in all.
• Quick reactions. The idle eyes can look curious, focused, pleased or worried as things happen.
• Your own AI key. A Settings → AI page for an optional key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini or Groq (Gemini and Groq have free tiers). The key is kept in Windows Credential Manager, requests go straight from your PC to the provider, local tools never need it, and there is no Krovi account.
• Sturdier basics. Timers and Pomodoro ring from the app itself when the panel is hidden, the File Shelf and World Clocks are stored in the app database, Screen Time counts local days and ignores sleep, lock and idle time, and Explain summarises long text section by section.

Changed

• The standalone Calculator tool is gone. The panel now has 15 entries. Math lives in the command palette: press Ctrl+K and type an expression such as 12*7+3; the answer appears as a row and Enter copies it. It handles + - * /, parentheses, decimals and percent, parsed by a small built-in evaluator rather than eval. It does not do units; Convert still handles those.
• Saying “open calculator” now launches the Windows Calculator app from your Start menu, like any other installed app.

The shelf moves to the top of your screen.

Krovi 0.2 turns the dropdown into a pill that lives at the top of your screen and springs open into the panel, then keeps everything on it live. It’s built on the clean-main branch; try it today in the browser demo.

New

• The Island. A small pill at the top centre of your primary monitor that morphs into the 15-tool panel and back. It never moves when it grows, folds away with Esc, a click elsewhere or the hotkey, and an invisible-area click-through means it never blocks the app underneath.
• Live clipboard. Copies appear within a fraction of a second, the pill glows, and entries from password managers are never stored.
• Live now playing. Title, artist, artwork and a ticking progress bar read from the Windows media session, with play/pause, next and previous.
• RAM and disk strip. Memory and system-drive usage refresh every two seconds along the bottom of the panel.
• Local voice, from a closed command list. Dictate notes, and run a fixed set of spoken commands: open any tool, timers and Pomodoro (including pause and cancel), new note, media controls, put the selection on the shelf or send it to your phone, open a folder or launch an app from a closed set (Windows known folders, Quick Access, your Start menu), list what is in a folder, find a file by name in the Windows Search index, and set a reminder with the exact date and time read back. It is not open-ended chat: anything outside the list is ignored. Recognition runs on your PC with Windows speech (SAPI 5) and voice commands make zero network calls, shown by a socket capture in the audit. Every phrasing, and what is not supported, is in the docs.
• Real reminders. A timed Calendar entry rings: a Windows notification and the system reminder sound at the set time, whether Krovi is a pill, a panel or hidden. Snooze 5 or 10 minutes, dismiss, or click to open the Calendar. Reminders missed while Krovi was closed fire once on the next start, marked as missed. With Windows Do Not Disturb on, the notification waits quietly in the notification centre (no banner, no sound) and the Calendar warns you.
• Explain. Paste text for an on-device summary (short, medium or key points) and have it read aloud with a Windows voice. Optionally add your own ElevenLabs key to read aloud with ElevenLabs voices; that sends the text being read to api.elevenlabs.io, is off by default, and falls back to the Windows voice on failure. The key lives in Windows Credential Manager. There is no AI-written explanation in this version.
• Holidays, offline. The Calendar bundles India (gazetted, restricted and observances, from the Department of Personnel and Training), US federal holidays (OPM) and Great Britain bank holidays for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (GOV.UK), 2025 to 2027, with a documented source for each year.
• Real checklists in Notes. Tick-box items sit inline between paragraphs of text in the same note.
• Quick Transfer. Send files between this PC and your phone over your own Wi-Fi with a QR code, with an optional PIN. No cloud relay, no account; the local server exists only while a share is open and expires on its own. It is plain HTTP on your local network, so use a network you trust. If the phone can’t connect, allow Krovi on Private networks in the Windows firewall prompt; the troubleshooting notes explain the rest.
• Six themes and an idle companion. Graphite, Porcelain, Mochi, Arcade, Terracotta and Tide, or follow Windows. After a few idle seconds the collapsed pill rests as a pair of eyes that wake the moment you touch it; it can be switched off.
• A new look. Glass and blur surfaces, restrained type and spring motion, in the theme of your choice.
• A real website and demo. This site, plus a live browser demo of the actual interface at /demo/.

Improved

• Settings for the hotkey (with clear errors when it’s invalid or taken), showing the pill, collapse on blur, hiding in fullscreen, and launching at login.
• A watchdog in the window shell, so expanding or folding can never leave Krovi stuck half-way.
• Single instance: launching Krovi again expands the existing panel.

Privacy

• Still zero telemetry. The outbound requests are optional keyless lookups (weather, a city-name search, exchange rates) and, only if you add your own key, ElevenLabs read-aloud, which sends the text being read. Voice makes none. Quick Transfer runs a server on your local network only while a share is open. The network audit covers each one.

The first installer.

The original left-rail panel, with the core tools and the privacy audit behind it.

What shipped

• Windows installers (.exe and .msi), built by GitHub Actions from a tagged commit.
• The panel with a left tool rail: clipboard history, timers and stopwatch, Pomodoro, file shelf, media controls, weather, notes, world clocks, units and currency, calculator, command palette and screen time.
• Keyless weather (Open-Meteo) and exchange rates (Frankfurter) as the only network calls, documented in a published network audit.
• An automated test suite: 99 Rust tests and 26 frontend tests at release.