Old Claude voice mode samples
Archiving something no one else is likely to care about.
And now for something completely different. In late July this year, Anthropic released a substantial update to Claude’s voice mode. Feel free to read that short post by Anthropic if you want to know what’s new. Although, with the speed the industry is currently moving, late July may as well be a decade ago. In fact, voice mode is already out of date again: it still uses Opus 4.8, not the freshly minted 5.5.
The overall direction of the update, and Anthropic in general, is toward professionalism. Examples of what to do with the new voice mode include thrilling things like practicing a client pitch, moving a meeting 30 minutes later, and turning your client-pitch conversation into a one-page Canva document. Among the victims of this suit-wearing and client-pitching update were the previous voice samples.
Up until the update, the voice samples were tongue twisters, which the voice model predictably did not struggle with. That “predictably” might be just a modern impression of voice models. Even the tiny Kokoro does not smear these. Anyhow, I thought those were a cute way of showing off. My favorite was Glassy implicitly telling us that it’s the best one.
Yesterday, for reasons I can’t reconstruct now, the samples came to mind again. I went to find one of the tongue twisters and learned about the update instead. That should give you a good impression of how often I use Claude’s voice mode. Searching for the samples online turned up nothing. I scrubbed through some older videos, but none of them contained the sample I was looking for.
So, I did the thing you do these days and sent ChatGPT to have a look. It dug up an SEO-spam page, A guide to uninstall Claude from your PC, that listed the MP3 filenames matching Claude’s voice options. I won’t link that page here for obvious reasons. Combined with a Reddit thread where someone mentioned that they still get the old preview, it guessed that a sufficiently old copy of the desktop app might contain the old voice samples. No wonder I didn’t stumble upon the answer in my search; who would willingly click on SEO spam?
A quick check of the last release before the update (claude-desktop-1.24012.9-linux.tar.gz), and yep: the Claude desktop app contains the audio files, rather than streaming them in from a server. In fact, I wouldn’t have had to download an old copy: they are still there in the latest release, located in claude-desktop/resources/ion-dist/audio/voice/selection/*.mp3. I don’t think there is a way to trigger them through the UI anymore.
Interestingly, I could not find the new samples in the bundle. Perhaps the desktop app fetches these from a server? If you open Claude.ai in your web browser and check the network tab, you can see them coming from https://assets.claude.ai/voice/selection/. The new samples are named <voice_name>-v3.mp3, except for Mellow, which is at v5. Wonder why that is.
I assume at some point Anthropic will clean up the bundle and remove the unused MP3s. So, I thought I might as well archive them here. Maybe someone else is a weirdo like me and wants to find them.
Buttery
Betty bought a bit of butter,
but the bit of butter Betty bought was bitter.
If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter,
but a bit of better butter will make my batter better.
So Betty bought a better bit of butter.
Airy
Amid the mists and coldest frosts,
with stoutest wrists and loudest boasts,
he thrusts his fists against the posts,
and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Mellow
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
A fuzzy bear was wuzzy.
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very fuzzy, was he?
Glassy
If practice makes perfect and perfect needs practice,
I’m perfectly practiced and practically perfect.
Rounded
She sells seashells by the seashore.
The shells she sells are surely from the sea.
So if she sells seashells on the seashore,
then I am sure she sells seashore shells.