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Anthropic’s Claude AI app is introducing a new voice conversation mode that allows you to ask questions about files stored in Google Drive, Gmail or Calendar.
The feature, which is being rolled out to the Claude mobile app in the “next few weeks”, allows the AI to act more like a PA, giving verbal summaries of emails you’ve been sent or letting you check if a certain file has been dropped in your Google Drive.
In a video demonstration of the new features, released on Anthropic’s X account, voice mode is used for a variety of Google-related tasks without actually having to open Google apps themselves.
The demo shows someone asking “Hey Claude, when’s my first meeting?” and the AI giving a verbal breakdown of what’s in the person’s calendar that day. Given that it’s fairly easy to get a visual glance of your calendar, that’s hardly a productivity gold rush, but some of the other demonstrated features do seem more valuable – if they work as well in real life as they do in the demo.
For example, the video shows someone asking “did I get an email from Bright & Co last night?” and the AI replying that they did indeed receive an email, before summarising the content of that email.
Likewise, the demo shows someone asking whether a colleague “uploaded the pitch notes” to their Google Drive, and the AI going off to search for the relevant file. When it returns a blank, the AI offers to draft an email, chasing the notes from the errant colleague – although from the demo, it’s not clear whether the AI is capable of sending the email or merely generating the text.
While voice modes in AI assistants are nothing new, this integration with third-party apps certainly goes further than anything we’ve seen so far from ChatGPT, which has included a conversational voice assistant for almost a year now.
While Claude’s voice mode will be available to all tiers, you need to pay for the Pro subscription ($17/£13 per month) to link your Claude account with third-party services, effectively making this a subscriber-only feature.
The announcement comes just a week after Anthropic released Claude 4, its latest AI model. Claude is particularly renowned for its coding abilities and last week saw the release of Claude Opus 4, which the company claims outperforms OpenAI’s o3 and GPT-4.1 in various coding benchmarks (although all AI companies cherry pick the coding benchmarks their models do well in).
Claude 4 also gives users on free accounts the ability to search the web for up-to-date information, which was a feature previously restricted to paying customers.
