Claude's voice mode just got a meaningful upgrade. Anthropic is rolling out a public beta that lets voice conversations run on its more capable models, Claude Opus and Sonnet, reach the tools you've already connected to Claude, and speak in a growing list of languages beyond English. The update is live today on mobile, desktop, and web.
From Haiku to Opus: the model upgrade that actually matters
Until now, voice mode was quietly running on Claude Haiku 4.5 regardless of what the model selector showed. A model selector had sat inside the voice interface for roughly three weeks, but the choice was cosmetic: whichever option you picked, the session still ran on Claude Haiku 4.5. That changes with this release.
Selecting Opus or Sonnet now routes voice conversations through those models rather than quietly falling back to Haiku. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Haiku is Claude's fastest, lightest model, optimized for speed and low cost. Opus and Sonnet sit above it in the reasoning hierarchy, handling longer chains of thought, multi-step tasks, and complex instructions significantly better.
Routing Opus or Sonnet into voice opens tasks that were awkward before, from longer reasoning to tool-heavy requests handled by speech. And crucially, the experience holds up: in testing, interruption handling held up well. The model pauses the moment it hears you and resumes sensibly, and it tolerated long silences without cutting in early.
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