anthropics / anthropics/claude-code

Voice dictation in the desktop app drops words throughout the recording — output is fragments, not a transcript (macOS, v2.1.237)

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area:desktop bug has repro platform:macos
Dominant language
Python
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Description

### Preflight Checklist

- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
- [x] This is a single bug report
- [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

### Environment

- Claude Code **desktop app**, v2.1.237
- macOS (Darwin 25.6.0)
- Microphone: built-in MacBook Pro microphone, default input device, 48 kHz, input level ~57%
- Dictation language: reproduces in **both** `en` and `de`
- Reproduces in **both** hold and tap mode — switching to tap makes no observable difference

### What's Wrong?

Voice dictation loses speech continuously throughout a recording — at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. The result is not a degraded transcript, it is fragments: isolated recognized chunks with the connecting speech missing entirely. Every dictated prompt has to be rewritten by hand, which removes the entire point of the feature.

This is not a microphone or OS-level problem, and not a language-setting problem:

- Same machine, same microphone, same spoken sentence, back to back: ChatGPT's dictation transcribes it essentially verbatim. Claude Code returns fragments.
- Setting the dictation language to `de` vs `en` makes no difference — both produce fragments when speaking the matching language.
- Switching from hold mode to tap mode makes no difference, so this is not only the documented hold-mode warmup dropping the first words.

A plausible cause is the streaming transcription design itself. ChatGPT records the full utterance and transcribes it as one batch; Claude Code streams and finalizes segments live. Each segment boundary is a place where audio can be dropped, and the observed symptom — loss spread evenly across the whole recording rather than concentrated at one end — fits that.

### What Should Happen?

A dictated passage should come back as a complete transcript, accurate enough to send without manual repair — comparable to what batch dictation in other assistants delivers on the same hardware.

### Steps to Reproduce

1. Desktop app, voice dictation enabled (either mode)
2. Speak a continuous passage at normal pace
3. Compare the inserted transcript against what was actually said

Observed: recognized fragments separated by gaps where speech was simply not transcribed. I can supply a verbatim spoken-vs-transcribed sample pair on request if that helps triage.

### Additional context

The recording limits compound this — the 15s silence auto-stop and the 2 minute maximum both cut in well before a real dictated prompt is finished. Tracked separately in #74534.

This overlaps a cluster of reports from spring 2026 that were auto-closed as duplicates or as inactive, never fixed, and are now locked: #43240 (umbrella), #40528 (start of speech dropped), #46154 (cuts out after 2-5 words mid-hold), #47592 (truncated after ~4 sentences). Filing fresh against 2.1.237 as the lock message instructs. The only comparable open issue, #80277, is scoped to the VS Code extension.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

No source file or test is named. Start by reproducing the loss with a continuous passage in both hold and tap modes and in English or German; done means the desktop app returns a complete transcript without gaps, while recording limits remain tracked separately in #74534.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
macos
Domain
audio-video-rtc, desktop
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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