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 lets users hold full spoken conversations with the chatbot rather than having to type prompts and read responses. According to Anthropic's support documentation, the models available in voice mode now follow the user's subscription plan, and voice conversations start on whichever model the user last selected in text chat.

Users can switch between Claude's models mid-conversation, and can also move between text and voice in the same chat without losing context.

In addition, Claude's Voice mode can now also tap into connected tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Slack, so Claude can check a calendar or summarize an email thread out loud, for example. Users with free accounts can connect one tool, whereas paid plans support more.

That's the main difference between Claude's voice mode and OpenAI's recently updated real-time voice feature for ChatGPT, which can't use different tools in the same conversation.

Claude's voice mode language support was extended beyond English earlier this year, with French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish available in beta. Users have to manually select a language in the app.

Voice mode works on iOS, Android, desktop, and the web, but Anthropic says it is designed to work best on phones. Voice conversations count toward standard usage limits and Anthropic's newest Fable model is not yet supported.

Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to be building a real-time voice mode for its Codex agent, based on app strings uncovered by TestingCatalog. The code references checking Slack, browsing, and even ordering food while background agents handle the tasks. That feature remains in testing, however, with no confirmed model or release timing.