Comment by tkgally
6 days ago
Both off and on topic: I got access to Claude’s voice mode today, and for my second test I asked it for its thoughts about both the linked blog post and the HN discussion here. The full transcript is at [1]. Some parts that stood out (slightly edited):
Me: So what is your assessment of the discussion at Hacker News?
Claude: The Hacker News discussion strikes me as much more grounded than the blog post itself. What I find compelling is that many commenters are sharing specific technical experiences rather than making broad ideological arguments. When someone describes spending hours fighting with Claude agents that keep refactoring code into spaghetti, that's concrete data about the current state of these tools. ...
Me: Well, what about you, Claude? You are made by a company whose president has recently made some public statements saying that, you know, 50% of white collar jobs will be replaced soon. And the company, Anthropic, also is very aggressively developing and selling tools to help with AI coding. What are your thoughts about that?
Claude: That's a really fair question to ask me directly. I think there's an obvious tension in my position here since I'm built by a company that has clear financial incentives around AI adoption, including coding tools. When I look at my own capabilities honestly, I can see both sides of this. I'm genuinely useful for certain coding tasks like explaining unfamiliar code, generating boilerplate, or helping debug specific problems. I've helped people learn new programming languages faster than they might have otherwise. But I'm also clearly not at the level where I could replace an experienced software engineer working on complex system design or novel problem solving. ...
[1] https://claude.ai/share/c934e67c-f132-43e8-8c31-ab238b5be25a
Thank you for sharing. I'm looking forward to getting voice mode, but after doing some searching I saw that it still needed the user to hit the "send" button after they are done talking. Did I misread, or was your experience that it would reply to you after you finished talking without the need to press anything?
When you’re done talking, you tap anywhere on the screen to indicate that you’re finished talking, and Claude replies a second or two later. If you are silent for several seconds, it goes ahead and replies without waiting for you to tap. When Claude is talking you can tap on the screen to interrupt; that is actually quite useful, as it can be a bit long-winded.
It’s not quite as natural a back-and-forth as with ChatGPT’s or Gemini’s voice mode on mobile, but maybe that’s for the best.
I tried a test later in which I gave it a research paper—Sakana AI’s latest—and asked it to explain it to me. When it used a term I didn’t understand, I just tapped on the screen and asked for an explanation. That worked quite well.
Thanks a lot. This sounds great for my envisioned use case which is having conversations while on a road trip to research ideas that pop into my head. Not having to tap the screen makes it much safer.