Claude Whisper

Record your voice and send the transcription directly into the Claude Code input box.

How it works

Press Ctrl+Shift+V while the Claude Code input is focused to toggle recording:

1. First press — starts recording from your microphone
2. Second press — stops recording, transcribes speech to text, and pastes the result into Claude Code

Platform support

Requirements

• Claude Code extension installed and active
• Python 3 available on your system
• One of the following audio tools (detected automatically in order):
  • parecord — part of pulseaudio-utils
  • arecord — part of alsa-utils
  • pw-record — part of pipewire

Most Linux desktop systems already have at least one of these installed.

First run

On first use, Claude Whisper will:

1. Install faster-whisper into the extension's private storage (~/.config/Code/User/globalStorage/...). This is a one-time setup that takes ~30 seconds and requires an internet connection.
2. Download the Whisper tiny speech model (~150 MB) to ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/. This also happens once and is cached permanently.

Subsequent uses are fast — no downloads, no setup.

Changing the keyboard shortcut

Open the Keyboard Shortcuts editor (Ctrl+K Ctrl+S), search for Claude Whisper: Toggle Recording, and assign any key combination you prefer.

Troubleshooting

"Unable to watch for file changes" (Linux)

VS Code shows this warning when the system's inotify watch limit is too low. Claude Whisper detects this at startup and will prompt you with a fix. If you see the notification, click Copy fix command, paste it into a terminal, and run it:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

This is a standard Linux system tuning setting — not specific to this extension. It tells the kernel to allow more file watchers, which VS Code needs on larger projects. The change persists across reboots.

Privacy

All processing is local. Your audio is never sent to any server — transcription runs entirely on your machine using the Whisper model.