The Canvascope side panel became more than a place to type a prompt. The v8 work pulled together local document parsing, active-page context, semantic matching, streaming fixes, and a dedicated chat surface that could sit beside a student's LMS instead of replacing it.
The important change was context. Canvascope could start answering with awareness of the page, the student's indexed materials, and the course artifacts already stored locally. That set up the later v10 work where AI, planning, profiles, and citations share one path.