Ethora 26.08: AI Message Translation, Secure Attachments, and a Compliance Audit Trail

Version 26.08 of the Ethora platform is live. This release wraps up our July development cycle and it is one of the most substantial updates of the year: chat conversations that translate themselves in real time, file attachments that stay locked to room members, and an audit trail designed for teams that answer to regulators.

Here is what shipped and why it matters.

What is new in Ethora 26.08?

• Real-time AI message translation, end to end
• Secure, membership-gated chat attachments
• A compliance-grade audit trail with immutable log export
• Better calls: redesigned audio call UI, reliable ringing and call history
• Monitoring and load-testing tools for self-hosted deployments
• A large performance and stability pass on the web chat SDK

How does real-time AI message translation work?

The headline feature of 26.08: every participant in a chat can now read the conversation in their own language while senders keep typing in theirs.

Translation happens on the sender side, and the translations travel inside the message itself. That means no extra round-trip when a reader opens the room: the right variant is already there, resolved by the reader’s full locale (including regional variants like fr-CA, es-US, or en-CA) with a clean fallback to the base language. Readers choose between automatic translation or an on-demand Translate button, and hosts embedding the React chat SDK can pin either mode or drive the picker from their own UI.

Two details we are particularly happy with: edited messages are re-translated automatically, so readers in other languages always see the latest text, and if a translation comes back identical to the original, we simply do not show it.

For self-hosted customers, the translation endpoint is configurable in your deployment, so you can route translation through your own approved AI endpoint. That matters if you operate under healthcare or financial data rules, which is exactly the audience our self-hosted chat server serves.

Alongside translation, the chat component’s own interface is now fully localized in English, French, and Spanish, across sign-in, settings, profiles, and room management.

What are secure chat attachments?

Until now, most chat products (ours included) served file attachments from storage that anyone with the link could read. For a hobby app that is fine. For a care team sharing a scan, it is not.

In 26.08, attachments can be membership-gated: files are stored in a private bucket and streamed back only to authenticated members of the room, using short-lived file tokens. No public URLs, no guessable links. The flow is documented in the public API reference and wired automatically by the self-hosted installer.

Combined with the healthcare chat SDK capabilities already in the platform, this closes one of the most common gaps flagged in compliance reviews of chat systems.

What does the new compliance audit trail record?

Regulated deployments need to answer a simple question with confidence: who did what, and who saw what? 26.08 gives the platform a verifiable, server-side answer:

• Message edits and deletes are recorded as audit events
• Reads of archived chat history are tracked with request and outcome
• Authentication outcomes are captured in the same trail
• Immutable export: a scheduled job ships audit logs to write-once storage, so the trail itself is tamper-evident

Everything is configurable per deployment and set up by the installer. If you are evaluating chat for a HIPAA-adjacent product, this plus secure attachments plus self-hosting is the combination auditors ask about.

What changed in calls?

Audio calls got their own compact call card with a cleaner layout that behaves on mobile. Calls now ring on any page of the app, with an OS-level notification when the tab is hidden, and an incoming call no longer double-rings on a backgrounded tab. Call history is now anchored to the server’s call state, so calls no longer vanish from history, and call push notifications reliably reach devices.

What is new for self-hosted operators?

Self-hosting is a first-class path for Ethora, and 26.08 ships the ops tooling to match:

• Monitoring stack included: Grafana and Prometheus dashboards deploy with the server, behind authenticated access, and start automatically on update
• Load testing built in: benchmark your own instance with ready-made scenarios and a metrics endpoint before go-live
• TLS certificate expiry checks: get warned before certificates lapse
• Backup and restore runbook for AWS deployments
• Installer hardening: config rendering and data directories are handled safely on clean machines and localhost installs

Start from the self-hosted chat server guide if you want to run the whole stack on your own infrastructure.

What else improved?

A long performance and stability pass on the web chat SDK: chat loading on heavy accounts is faster, sending is quick again with translation taken off the send path, the local cache no longer evicts messages when rosters grow, refreshing the page restores your session without flashing the login form, and unread badges and the New Messages divider behave through reconnects. Group rooms gained an online-members popover, so you can see who is around straight from the room list. App-wide broadcast messaging is now restricted to admin and B2B roles following a customer feedback round.

On the AI SDK side, the embeddable widget and developer tooling kept pace with the release, and the platform’s AI agent tooling continues to evolve on its own track.

Try it now

Everything above is available today. Create a free app at ethora.com, drop the React chat component into your project, and turn on message translation from the language modal – it works on the free tier. Full technical notes, commit by commit, live in the release notes on GitHub.

If you are evaluating chat and AI infrastructure for a regulated product, book a call or see pricing for self-hosted and dedicated options.