Voice mode: add multilingual support (French transcription is poor)
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 12, 2026 by lescientifik Closed Mar 15, 2026
Summary
Voice mode (/voice, push-to-talk with Space) works great for English but produces very poor transcription for French. Since Claude itself handles French perfectly, the bottleneck is the speech-to-text layer.
Environment
- Fedora 43 (Sway/Wayland)
- PipeWire 1.4.8
- sox installed, mic working correctly
- Claude Code latest (auto-updates enabled)
Steps to reproduce
- Enable voice mode (
voiceEnabled: truein settings) - Hold Space and speak in French
- Observe garbled/incorrect transcription
English speech in the same setup transcribes correctly.
Expected behavior
Voice mode should support major languages (at minimum French, Spanish, German, etc.), either via:
- A
voiceLanguagesetting insettings.json - Automatic language detection (Whisper supports this natively)
Impact
This effectively makes voice mode English-only, which limits its usefulness for non-English-speaking developers who otherwise use Claude in their native language daily.
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