Anthropic lets Claude voice mode use Opus, Sonnet, or Haiku

Weeks after OpenAI rolled out a new family of conversational models and updated ChatGPT’s voice mode, rival Anthropic is making its own move to make Claude more voice-friendly. The company said Thursday that users can now choose between the Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku models when using voice mode, rather than being limited to a single option.

Claude’s voice mode, released last year and powered by the Haiku model, delivered quick responses but wasn’t well suited to complex work. With the new update, voice mode automatically picks up the last model a person used in text chat and runs that model’s fastest version by default.

Anthropic said the new voice mode can help with longer conversations, including giving feedback on a person’s communication style, talking through a pitch to a client, and brainstorming product market research. Voice mode can also tap into other apps — Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Canva, and Notion — letting users ask it to update a meeting slot, draft an email, or create a document in Notion.

That’s a notable difference from OpenAI’s voice mode, which refreshed its conversational style with its own update but, according to Anthropic, still isn’t able to use different tools to get work done.

Earlier this year, Anthropic added multilingual support to Claude’s voice mode in beta, letting people talk in various languages — though they still have to manually specify which one. The feature currently supports English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish (Latin America/Spain).

The new voice mode is available in beta to all users across platforms. Free users, however, are restricted to using the Haiku model with only one connected app. Anthropic didn’t make any changes to the voice model with this release and hasn’t detailed what kind of voice stack it uses — meaning, unlike OpenAI’s release, users might not find conversational improvements such as better interruption handling.

Why it matters

The tool integrations put Claude’s voice mode ahead of OpenAI’s on turning a spoken request into a completed task, a gap that could matter as more of the day-to-day work shifts to voice-driven AI assistants.