Anthropic has updated Claude’s voice mode to support its more powerful Opus and Sonnet models, expanding a feature that was previously limited to the company’s fastest but simplest model, Haiku.
Voice mode allows users to have full spoken conversations with the chatbot rather than having to type prompts and read responses. Users can switch between Claude’s models during a conversation, and can also switch from text to voice within the same chat without losing context. With the addition of support for Opus and Sonnet, users will be able to hold longer and more complex conversations, including providing feedback on communication style.
Additionally, Claude’s Voice mode can now also access connected tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Slack, so Claude can check a calendar or summarize a thread out loud, for example. Users with free accounts can connect a single tool, while paid plans support more.
This is the main difference between Claude’s voice mode and OpenAI’s recently updated real-time voice feature for ChatGPT, which cannot use different tools in the same conversation.
According to Anthropic’s support documentation, models available in voice mode now follow the user’s subscription plan and voice conversations start on the model last selected by the user in text chat.
Language support for Claude’s voice mode was expanded beyond English earlier this year, with French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish available in beta. Users must manually select a language in the app.
Voice Mode works on iOS, Android, desktop, and web, but Anthropic says it’s designed to work better on phones. Voice chats are within standard usage limits and Anthropic’s latest Fable model is not yet supported.
Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to be creating a real-time voice mode for its Codex agent, based on application strings discovered by Test catalog. The code refers to checking Slack, browsing, and even ordering food while agents in the background handle the tasks. This feature remains under testing, however, with no confirmed model or release schedule.
