A few days ago I put Sprig on your phone. Chervil Chat — a chat-only Chervil that runs in any mobile browser, no app store, no API key.
The very first thing people asked was some version of: "this is great, but what happens when the answer makes me want to actually do something?"
Because a phone is where questions start. You're in a store, on the couch, walking somewhere. But a phone is a lousy place to finish real work — to turn a back-and-forth into a page, pull it into a Space, keep going with everything the desktop app can do.
0.23.0 closes that gap. And while I was in there, Chervil Chat itself grew up.
Beam it to your desk
Here's the whole feature. You're chatting with Sprig on your phone and it's turning into something. You tap ↗ To desktop.
That's it. The next time Chervil is in focus on your computer, the conversation is just there — opened in a chat tab, the whole history intact, ready for you to keep going or say "compose this into a page" and let the desktop do what the desktop does.
No copy-paste. No emailing yourself. No "now where did I put that." The chat you started standing in line finishes at your desk, mid-thought.
It rides your account — you're signed in on the phone, and the desktop uses its publish token (Settings → Publishing) — so it's a private, one-time delivery to your machine. Nobody else's, nowhere public.
I built it on the same "Open in Chervil" plumbing the Ctrl+Shift+Space quick-chat already uses to hand a conversation into a tab, so the landing is battle-tested. The phone just needed a way to knock.
Chervil Chat grew up
The handoff is the headline, but the phone app got three things that make it worth reaching for in the first place:
Talk to it. Tap the mic and dictate — the words appear as you speak. On a phone, where typing is the tax you pay for asking anything, being able to just say it changes how often you bother. (It uses your browser's on-device speech, so it's best on Android Chrome for now.)
Show it a photo. Tap the camera, attach a picture, and ask. What is this? What does this label say? Is this plant okay? Sprig looks at the image and answers. It's the thing a phone is uniquely good at — you already have the camera in your hand.
It remembers. Close the app, come back later, and your conversation is still there instead of a blank slate. Small thing, big difference in whether it feels like an app or a toy.
Plus the small stuff that should've been there from day one: replies are formatted now (bold, lists, links — not raw markdown), every message has a copy button, and if you long-press the icon on Android you get quick shortcuts straight to New chat, Talk to Sprig, or Photo chat.
One honest fix worth calling out
While building the vision feature I found that xAI had, in the span of a few weeks, retired both the model Chervil's managed AI defaulted to and the Live Search API it used to ground answers. That had quietly broken every managed-inference feature — the mobile chat, hosted page applets, and living-page refreshes — for anyone on the Grok-backed managed tier.
It's fixed: all of it now runs on the current model through xAI's Agent Tools API. If you'd published a live applet or a living page and noticed it going quiet, this is why, and it's working again.
Where this is going
The phone-to-desktop bridge is one direction today: start on mobile, finish on desktop. The other direction — glance at what your desktop is working on from your phone — is the obvious next step, and this release lays the pipe for it.
For now: Chervil Chat is part of Pro, the desktop app stays free and open source, and the loop between them is finally closed.
Chervil is free and open source. Grab 0.23.0 for your desktop, and open getchervil.com/chat on your phone.
Ask it standing up. Finish it sitting down.