Anthropic updates Claude voice mode with more capable models

Weeks after OpenAI rolled out a new family of conversational models and updated ChatGPT’s voice mode, rival Anthropic is taking its steps to make Claude more voice-friendly with a new update. The company said Thursday that users can choose between Opus, Sonnet and Haiku models.

Claude’s voice mode, released last year and powered by the Haiku model, provided quick responses but wasn’t well suited to complex work. The company said that with the new update, voice mode will choose the last model people used in text chat and use the fastest version by default.

Anthropic said the new voice mode can help users with longer conversations, including providing feedback on their communication style, talking through a pitch with a customer and brainstorming product market research.

Additionally, Claude’s voice mode can leverage other apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Canva, and Notion. This means users can ask it to update a meeting slot, compose an email, or create a document in Notion.

This is a particularly big difference from OpenAI’s voice mode, which has updated the conversational style but still lacks the ability to use different tools to get work done.

Earlier this year, Anthropic added multilingual support to Claude’s voice mode in beta. It said that users can now talk in different languages, but they will have to manually specify the language. Currently, Anthropic supports English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish (Latin America/Spain).

The new voting mode is available to all users in beta across platforms. However, free users will be limited to using the Haiku model with only one connected app.

Anthropic has made no changes to the voting model with this release and has not detailed what type of voices it uses. That means that unlike the OpenAI release, users may not find conversation improvements such as better interruption handling.