Claude will eventually start speaking up during your chats

(Image credit: Anthropic)

Anthropic CEO has promised several updates to Claude, including one that gives it memory.
This means the AI can remember things and bring it up in future conversations.
It remains to be seen how this performs and is slated to arrive in the coming months.

The Claude AI chatbot will receive major upgrades in the months ahead, including the ability to listen and respond by voice alone. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei explained the plans to the Wall Street Journal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, including the voice mode and an upcoming memory feature.

Essentially, Claude is about to get a personality boost, allowing it to talk back and remember who you are. The two-way voice mode promises to let users speak to Claude and hear it respond, creating a more natural, hands-free conversation. Whether this makes Claude a more accessible version of itself or will let it mimic a human on the phone is questionable, though.

Either way, Anthropic seems to be aiming for a hybrid between a traditional chatbot and voice assistants like Alexa or Siri, though presumably with all the benefits of its more advanced AI.

Claude’s upcoming memory feature will allow the chatbot to recall past interactions. For example, you could share your favorite book, and Claude will remember it the next time you chat. You could even discuss your passion for knitting sweaters and Claude will pick up the thread in your next conversation. While this memory function could lead to more personalized exchanges, it also raises questions about what happens when Claude mixes those memories with an occasional hallucination.

Claude demand

Still, there's no lack of interest in what Claude can do. Amodei mentioned that Anthropic has been overwhelmed by the surge in demand for AI over the past year. Amodei explained that the company’s compute capacity has been stretched to its limits in recent months.

Anthropic’s push for Claude’s upgrades is part of its effort to stay competitive in a market dominated by OpenAI and tech giants like Google. With OpenAI and Google integrating ChatGPT and Gemini into everything they can think of, Anthropic needs to find a way to stand out. By adding voice and memory to Claude’s repertoire, Anthropic hopes to stand out as an alternative that might lure away fans of ChatGPT and Gemini.

A voice-enabled, memory-enhanced AI chatbot like Claude may also serve as a leader, or at least a competitor, among the trend of making AI chatbots seem more human. The aim seems to be to blur the line between a tool and a companion. And if you want people to use Claude to that extent, a voice and a memory are going to be essential.

Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.