Anthropic launches a voice mode for Claude

(techcrunch.com)

121 points | by kordlessagain 3 days ago

10 comments

  • simonw 1 day ago
    From that article:

    > According to the report, Anthropic was holding talks with Amazon, the company’s major investor and partner, and voice-focused AI startup ElevenLabs, to possibly drive future voice features for Claude.

    > It’s unclear which of those partnerships, if any, came to fruition.

    Here's an easy way to confirm that: check Anthropic's "Trust Center" and review any recent updates. https://trust.anthropic.com/updates

    Sure enough, on May 29th they have a subprocessor change:

    > As of May 29th, 2025, we have added ElevenLabs, which supports text to speech functionality in Claude for Work mobile apps.

    I wonder what they're using for speech-to-text?

    • zaptrem 1 day ago
      Maybe also 11L’s Scribe model?
  • owenpalmer 1 day ago
    Things I love:

    1. Start and stop button. I love this explicit control over who is talking when.

    2. Ability to upload files while the voice chat is going. Great idea. Often times I use gpt voice chat for studying, and it's annoying when I need to add another PDF to the context, since I need to stop the chat, upload, and then restart the voice session.

    3. Real-time text display during voice chat. I asked you to take the derivative of a function I described, and it outlined its steps, but it wasn't just the transcription of what it was saying.

    Things I hate:

    1. The transcription is terrible. It took me 10 tries during the conversation to describe f(x) = x^2. Looking back on the transcriptions, it's literally nonsense.

    2. There was a buggy moment when the voice conversation started but it was still demoing all the voice options simultaneously. Need some polishing.

    • wkat4242 6 hours ago
      I thought transcription was a solved problem now. I run whisper at home and it's blazing fast and accurate with the large model <3. If anthropic is much worse they need to up their game. Or just use Whisper until they do.
    • Fairburn 10 hours ago
      Yet, using Abacus.AIs mobile app, you do not need a.. talk.. no talk UI control. It detects when you interject. Would be a nice feature for Claude as well.
      • jazzyjackson 6 hours ago
        But does the bot know not to interject if I pause to think?
  • grg0 1 day ago
    Does it say "y'all"?
    • esafak 1 day ago
      No, it says youse.
      • eru 1 day ago
        Alas, English used to have a perfectly fine 'thou', but then people abandoned it. And now they are re-inventing the same distinction.

        Now just wait until people address a single other person with youse, and then have to make up yous'all to address groups.

        (Evolution of language is fascinating. I'm just pretending to be upset.)

        • JumpCrisscross 1 day ago
          > English used to have a perfectly fine 'thou'

          Thou was second-person singular. Y’all is second-person plural.

          • mkl 23 hours ago
            "You" used to be the second person plural, as a counterpart to "thou".
            • eru 13 hours ago
              Exactly. And y'all had to be invented, because 'you' became ambiguous.
        • thfuran 1 day ago
          Ye is really the missing piece.
      • mattnewton 1 day ago
        ^yinz
  • refulgentis 1 day ago
    There was a seemingly odd quick sequence of announcements from elevenlabs the last 24 hours, makes me think it's them - notably, I believe they launched 2.0 of their conversational AI today.
    • ecocentrik 1 day ago
      The Feynman voice would be great. I've been using it for non-fiction audio books and it works so well.
  • andrewstuart 1 day ago
    I really wish Anthropic would focus all of their developer resources on implementing “download all files”.

    I know it’s a massive challenge and might take years to get right but the endless copy and paste is wearing me down.

    • rahilsheikh 1 day ago
      You know you could just use the filesystem mcp server and give it access to your project/downloads folder.
    • bdangubic 1 day ago
      use claude code
      • andrewstuart 1 day ago
        I can’t afford it.
        • mceachen 1 day ago
          Their new MAX 5x plan is flat rate $3/day but IME it's enough to drive all-day multi-concurrent-sessions if you stay on sonnet.

          Their MAX 20x is double the cost $~6/day for quadruple the quota.

          Keep in mind that Opus chows quota at 5x+ the rate of sonnet.

          • bn-l 1 day ago
            I have no idea how anyone can go through that many tokens and maintain coherent code. Really, I think I’m missing something I would love to see a video of this being done live. My own experience (since 2022) is having to keep a very close eye on everything that’s happening. Refactoring manually. Going between models. Reformulating the prompt. Etc.
            • mceachen 21 hours ago
              Having a design doc, implementation and testing plan, strict linter, and strict compiler helps keep the robots on the rails IMHO.

              But even then, I never let it git add or git commit, and about half the time it runs in “ask me before you do any edits” mode and re-guiding it in real time as I see things going sideways.

        • danw1979 1 day ago
          Use Claude Desktop with MCP attached to your IDE (if you’re coding)
  • diamondfist25 22 hours ago
    Hn people are too poor to pay for max?
    • rudedogg 7 hours ago
      Or some people aren’t seeing the value at $100/mo
  • nprateem 1 day ago
    Meh, Anthropic are dead to me until they have structured output.
    • kashunstva 1 day ago
      > Anthropic are dead to me…

      They’re dead to me until they fix their over-aggressive auto-ban. Having done nothing more than traveling frequently, rarely using VPN and only using it for coding, I was caught up in a random inexplicable auto-ban. Zero customer service. Appeal process that leads to a black hole. Whatever their technical advances, their user experience when something goes awry is terrible.

    • revicon 1 day ago
      • nprateem 20 hours ago
        Yeah but it's XML not pydantic which means it doesn't play well with failovers to other providers. It would be tolerable if Anthropic didn't have such abysmal API uptime but at this point no way will I use them for my SaaS.
  • bariswheel 1 day ago
    I really want to like Claude, but I hit their limit WAY too early when I PAID for it, 9 months ago, WAY before I hit any type of limit on gippity. (gippity - gpt , gimminy - gemini).
    • ChadNauseam 1 day ago
      Haha, I respect calling it gippity. It reminds me of "I call patrick subaru"
      • eru 1 day ago
        I call her gippity, but I abbreviate the name as GPT when typing.

        Just like world-wide-web and www.

  • jsnider3 1 day ago
    I like it, but giving Claude a "Deep Research" mode would be better.
    • heyhuy 1 day ago
      Have not used it myself, but Claude has Research mode in beta.
    • polskibus 1 day ago
      It has Research , works well with Web Search. Saves a lot of time compared to googling and trying to synthesise knowledge yourself.
  • curtisszmania 1 day ago
    [dead]