from Hacker News

Anthropic launches a voice mode for Claude

by kordlessagain on 5/28/25, 2:41 PM with 42 comments

  • by simonw on 5/31/25, 3:20 AM

    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?

  • by owenpalmer on 5/31/25, 2:33 AM

    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.

  • by refulgentis on 5/31/25, 2:23 AM

    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.

  • by grg0 on 5/31/25, 2:25 AM

    Does it say "y'all"?

  • by andrewstuart on 5/31/25, 3:11 AM

    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.

  • by diamondfist25 on 5/31/25, 2:31 PM

    Hn people are too poor to pay for max?

  • by nprateem on 5/31/25, 3:54 AM

    Meh, Anthropic are dead to me until they have structured output.

  • by bariswheel on 5/31/25, 2:51 AM

    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).

  • by jsnider3 on 5/31/25, 2:46 AM

    I like it, but giving Claude a "Deep Research" mode would be better.