Talk to Claude Code and hear the reply, inside your editor. English or Hindi, on
macOS and Windows, with speech recognition and speech output that run on your own
machine — nothing is sent to a speech service, and there is no API key.
What it does
Press the microphone (or Alt+Space), speak, and pause. Live captions show your
words on screen as you say them, Claude Code answers in the project you have open,
and the reply is read aloud.
Talk over a reply to stop it and say something else.
Hindi and Hinglish work as first-class inputs, and replies come back the same way.
Switch projects by voice: "switch to listurad", "listurad pe jao".
Claude does ordinary work — making folders, writing files, running the project —
without stopping to ask, exactly as it does in the terminal.
Requirements
Claude Code, installed and logged in (claude on your PATH). The extension uses
your existing subscription; it never asks for an API key.
Vaani, the local service that does the speech work. The extension installs it
for you automatically the first time you use it — or install it yourself ahead of
time:
pip install vaani-voice # or: pipx install vaani-voice
vaani stt setup # one-time: permissions (macOS) or model (Windows)
macOS uses Apple's on-device recogniser and the system voices. macOS will ask
once for Microphone and Speech Recognition access.
Windows downloads a speech model the first time (about 0.5 GB) and uses the
voices Windows already has. For Hindi output, add a Hindi voice in
Settings → Time & language → Speech.
If vaani is not on your PATH, set vaani.command to its full path.
Settings
Setting
Default
What it does
vaani.command
vaani
the service executable
vaani.speakReplies
true
read replies aloud
vaani.handsFree
true
hold a whole conversation: keep listening after each reply, talk over Claude to interrupt it, click the mic again to end it
vaani.target
—
which named project turns go to
Everything else — language, voice, wake phrase, how long a pause ends your turn — lives
in vaani's own configuration, shared with its terminal version.
Privacy
Audio never leaves your machine and is never written to disk. Transcripts and replies
are shown in the panel and are kept out of the log unless you turn that on.
