Claude’s voice mode is getting a sizable upgrade, Anthropic announced on Thursday in a blog post. Your voice prompts are now powered by new models, and it’s capable of speaking in different languages.
The ability to talk to AI chatbots with your voice is nothing new, but Anthropic’s latest updates add a bit more than just understanding you better. Voice mode now runs on Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, when it was previously only available on the latter. Using Haiku made for a great, quick conversation with Claude, but without the ability to dive as deeply as other models can. That’s now all changed with Thursday’s announcement.
Talking to chatbots with your voice is becoming easier, and Anthropic sought to bring stronger models into the mix so conversations could go more in-depth. With the ability to use both Claude’s Opus and Sonnet models, conversations should be smoother, and without the potential hiccups of the more efficient but slightly stilted model.
You can now also change models in the middle of a voice conversation and switch from voice to text with the need of having to start a new conversation. The last feature may sound small, but it can be meaningful if you’ve had a deep conversation with AI using your voice, but your current situation changes, and you need to switch to a text-only conversation.
Talk to your tools
It’s not just about better models in voice mode — you can now also talk to your third-party connections in voice mode to perform actions. Now, you can speak directly with the tools you’ve connected to Claude, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack and Canva. In action, you can ask Claude to push back a meeting if you’re running late in Google Calendar or tell it to summarize emails and begin drafting responses to the most important ones.
As AI becomes more agentic and takes action on your behalf, even for simple things, just talking into your mic makes that experience more seamless.
New language support
Anthropic has now expanded voice mode significantly with support for new languages. The full list of languages is now:
- English
- French
- German
- Hindi
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Spanish (Latin America)
- Spanish (Spain)
At the moment, you’ll need to manually tell Claude to switch languages, but you can also do that with your voice, too. You can also do this within menus.
The new updates to voice mode are available in beta to all users on mobile, desktop and web. There are limitations for free users — keeping the voice mode model to Haiku and only one connected tool, but with support for all languages. Paid users can access the newly expanded access to new models and all connected third-party applications. Anthropic says that all usage counts towards your typical usage limits.
Read the full article here