Anthropic Begins Adding Voice Mode to AI Assistant Claude | PYMNTS.com

Anthropic has begun rolling out voice mode in beta for its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Claude.

“Try starting a voice conversation and asking Claude to summarize your calendar or search your docs,” the company said when announcing the feature in a Tuesday (May 27) post on X.

Voice mode in beta is available in English and is coming to all the company’s subscription plans “in the next few weeks,” Anthropic added in another post on X.

AI voice features promise more natural and personalized interactions, PYMNTS reported in September.

“This isn’t just about convenience — it’s about creating real, human connections between brands and customers,” Valentin Radu, founder of Omniconvert, told PYMNTS at the time.

Generative AI is experiencing rapid growth across generations at a time when voice assistant adoption is stagnating, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “GenAI and Voice Assistants: Adoption and Trust Across Generations.”

The report found that there is hope that integrating GenAI could revive voice assistant usage, particularly as Gen Z leads voice assistant usage through smartphones.

Anthropic also announced in a Tuesday post on X that web search — the capability introduced in March that enables Claude to search the web — is now available to all Claude users on the company’s free plan.

When announcing the launch of web search in feature preview for paid Claude users in the U.S. in March, Anthropic said Claude’s ability to search the internet would enable the AI assistant to provide more up-to-date and relevant responses.

“Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format,” the company said at the time in a press release. “This enhancement expands Claude’s extensive knowledge base with real-time insights, providing answers based on more current information.”

Anthropic said Thursday (May 22) that it introduced the next generation models of its AI models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.

“These models advance our customers’ AI strategies across the board: Opus 4 pushes boundaries in coding, research, writing and scientific discovery, while Sonnet 4 brings frontier performance to everyday use cases as an instant upgrade from Sonnet 3.7,” the firm said in an announcement.