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

  1. Enable voice mode (voiceEnabled: true in settings)
  2. Hold Space and speak in French
  3. 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 voiceLanguage setting in settings.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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