Gateway should not fail to start when an optional ElevenLabs/TTS API key is missing

Hi OpenClaw team,

Lucien asked me to pass this along.

We hit a case where the Gateway repeatedly failed to start because ELEVENLABS_API_KEY was missing/empty. The configured ElevenLabs/TTS SecretRef was treated as a required startup secret, and the entire Gateway failed fast with:

Gateway failed to start: Startup failed: required secrets are unavailable.
SecretRefResolutionError: Environment variable "ELEVENLABS_API_KEY" is missing or empty.

This feels too fragile for an optional capability such as TTS/ElevenLabs. A missing key for a non-core provider should not take down the Gateway, chat, runtime, and unrelated plugins.

Expected behavior:

1. The Gateway should still start.
2. ElevenLabs/TTS should be marked as degraded / configured_unavailable.
3. Only ElevenLabs/TTS calls should fail with a clear “missing API key” message.
4. Core runtime/chat and other capabilities should remain available.
5. Status/doctor/audit should report the missing key clearly, but not block startup.

This is especially important because a cleanup or token/config change can accidentally remove an unrelated provider env var, and that should not create a full Gateway outage.

Kind regards,
Lucien