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August 2026

Covers: releases from 1 to 31 August 2026

August brought the Marketplace redesign, the Kumkuat Slack app, a new left navigation, languages for audiences and readers, video walkthroughs, and a long list of quality, privacy and performance improvements.

  • New left navigation. Everything about your audiences sits under Audiences (Dashboard, Scorecards, Chat, Audience Reports, Content Writing, Surveys), and everything about the market sits under Competitive Intelligence (Communications, Themes, Entities, Alerts, Reports). Narrative Testing appears as Audience Reports. The assistant Chat opens from the chat bar rather than the nav, and Documentation is now Guides.
  • Video walkthroughs. An info icon in the top bar opens a short walkthrough of the page you are on. The same recordings are in Video walkthroughs.
  • Dark mode pass across the app, including the active audience card, home, entities and status pages.
  • Members see a tidier app: create-persona controls appear only where the role allows them, and every member has a settings cog.

Marketplace, redesigned​

  • Persona-first browsing with label-driven packages, a hero bar, and a category step. Details open in a new tab, and an audiences-only view hides everything else.
  • Bulk install with per-category remapping, so installed personas land in the categories you use.
  • Installs carry everything: voice details, cached grounded answers, and prompt edits stay in sync with the catalog. Managed personas show the Marketplace avatar.
  • Install rights follow the permissions matrix.

See Marketplace.

Slack app​

  • Add to Slack from Workspace settings, Integrations. Chat with an audience from any channel, run a narrative test on a shared file, and receive alert digests in a channel or DM with formatted scorecards and the full report attached.

See Slack.

Languages​

  • Audience language per workspace and per persona: personas respond in the language your audience speaks.
  • Reading language per user, and a translate toggle in chat to read a reply in your own language.
  • Sourcing follows the market language, and translated names are checked for near-duplicates before they are created.

Personas and onboarding​

  • Create personas by chatting. Describe who you need and Kumkuat drafts and grounds the personas; you can upload a spreadsheet inside the same chat.
  • Tuning mode in the editor shows proposed changes as diff cards and applies them in bulk.
  • Spreadsheet onboarding: map and preview columns before import, keep links, choose how many personas to generate with an honest shortfall report, reuse the audiences a workspace already has, and see near-duplicate warnings. Re-uploading a sheet no longer overwrites fields you curated.
  • Truth Social joins X, Bluesky and LinkedIn as a persona platform, with handle discovery and bulk-import support.
  • A workspace's name is independent of the company name, so one company can have several workspaces.
  • When a chat question is off-corpus, Kumkuat suggests a grounded prompt instead of guessing.

See Personas and Choosing your audiences.

Content Writing​

  • Workspace templates, private or shared, stored server-side.
  • Private and shared voices per user, and custom voices beyond the first page now reach the picker.
  • Draft titles no longer carry the uploaded file's name, and the "+" wizard converts markdown and falls back to a proper title.
  • Revisions pass the same anti-cliché filter as first drafts, annotation positions stay aligned across paragraph breaks, the template reference document is sent on every generation path, an untested audience is never shown as graded, and truncated rewrites are salvaged instead of failing.

Narrative Testing and Surveys​

  • Claude is the default analysis model for Narrative Testing.
  • A truncated analysis report is recovered instead of ending the run, document search reaches every match, and scraped page chrome is rejected as evidence.
  • Surveys: a methodology and provenance block on the deck, every number cites its sources, and you can survey any subject, not only innovations.

See Narrative Testing and Audience Surveys.

Alerts and notifications​

  • Alert emails use the real section design.
  • A transient mail failure no longer drops a digest for good, and the notification bell stops polling in background tabs.
  • Audience Chat has its own feature toggle, separate from the assistant Chat.

Communications and sources​

  • Workspace Status: trigger jobs on demand and change recurring frequencies, individually or in bulk.
  • Documents record whether coverage is owned, earned or paid.
  • Crawler fixes: a whole-page form wrapper no longer swallows the article, the first date on a page is no longer mistaken for the publish date, and newsroom discovery no longer attaches another company's newsroom.
  • Knowledge-base tag filters and counts are scoped strictly to your workspace.

Privacy and security​

  • Sign-in sessions use short-lived signed tokens instead of a raw API key in the cookie, with Secure cookies in production.
  • API keys can expire and be rotated.
  • Uploads are private by default and read back through authenticated links.
  • Stored files are destroyed 30 days after a document is deleted, and deleting a workspace purges its stored files.
  • Google Analytics was removed from the signed-in app.

See Data handling FAQ.

Faster and more reliable​

  • Persona profile, admin and sign-in bootstrap load in parallel; static assets are cached.
  • Half of all API requests were uncached preflight checks; they are cached now.
  • Every API call has a time bound, and the app no longer creates a chat session on every page view.

Fixes​

  • Sign-in on iPhone Chrome, a workspace-switcher error for some sessions, and past Audience Chat threads opening blank.
  • Retired models are no longer offered in workspace settings.
  • Scorecards: colour declarations restored on the Audience Scorecard, an unstated confidence reads as unknown, only the latest reaction is shown, and a blank template no longer hides audiences from the composer.
  • An invitee who already has an account can accept the invitation, access requests are captured and shown at login, and deleting a knowledge base stops its sources crawling into it.
  • Marketplace: suggestion padding, empty candidate pools, package membership by label.