How is this different from Claude.ai’s voice mode?+
Claude’s voice mode is a spoken conversation with the assistant — great for chat, but it doesn’t act on your codebase: no repo edits, no terminal commands, no tool approvals. Verbative is an agentic development extension for VS Code that drives the Claude Code CLI — the agent that actually edits your repo and runs commands in your terminal — by voice. Crucially you don’t have to flip on auto-accept and lose visibility: every permission Claude Code CLI asks for is spoken aloud with what it’s about to do, and you say “approve”, “deny”, or “explain” to act on it. Full information, you stay in the loop, no keyboard.
What does this actually do that Claude Code CLI doesn’t already?+
Claude Code CLI has built-in dictation, but you have to press a key to start and stop it, and there’s no voice path for permission prompts, status checks, or aborting a run. Verbative adds the wake word, voice-driven permission approval with full spoken explanations, “update” for a spoken status check while Claude is working, and “stop claude” to abort. The keyboard becomes optional, not required.
What's Advisory Board?+
An opt-in design-review panel for your ideas. When you’re adding a feature or rethinking your architecture, every prompt is reviewed in parallel by a panel of domain advisors — by default Backend, Frontend, Security & Compliance, QA, Product Manager and DevOps — before your Tech Lead session even responds, so a fresh design gets a guiding second look against each discipline’s standards. Each runs as a one-shot Haiku call, each gets its own distinct voice via Kokoro, and each only speaks when the concern is genuinely in their lane. After the Tech Lead does the work, the same panel reviews the result; if anything was missed they force exactly one revision pass, then the loop ends. The board is fully customizable: deactivate any advisor, or add your own with its own name, focus and voice — and click any advisor to see, read-only, the exact instructions it’s given. Toggle in the Verbative sidebar or say “advisory board” by voice.
How does the 14-day free trial work?+
Click “Start 14-day free trial” and check out — you get the full Advanced plan (memory engine, unlimited hands-free loops, everything) free for 14 days. A card is collected at the start but nothing is charged during the trial, and Stripe emails you a reminder before the first charge. Cancel anytime before the trial ends and you pay nothing; your account then continues on Free with its daily limits.
What happens to my memory when the trial ends?+
Nothing is deleted — ever. Your memories are plain, human-readable files inside your own project, and they stay exactly where they are: readable, exportable, and git-trackable. What pauses is the engine — automatic capture and recall into prompts stop until you upgrade, and the moment you do, everything resumes with the full memory your agents had already built.
Is my voice sent to your servers?+
Never to ours. And with Local mode, not to anyone’s. You choose how the prompt is transcribed: Cloud mode uses Claude Code CLI’s own dictation on Anthropic’s infrastructure (we only ever see usage counts — no audio, no transcripts), while Local mode — privacy-first, available and on by default on every plan — transcribes the entire prompt on-device with whisper.cpp. Your voice never leaves your Mac. (Your pick of whisper model, tiny → large-v3, is available on every plan.) Either way, wake-word detection is always local.
What languages can I speak?+
Roughly 99. Just speak — Verbative translates whatever you dictate to English on-device with whisper.cpp before it ever reaches Claude. It's always on, on every plan, with nothing to switch on. The major languages — Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, and more — translate cleanest; lower-resource languages still work but a little less smoothly. The voice commands themselves always stay English, and on the full Large v3 model Verbative also names the language it heard.
What gets metered?+
Only the Free tier — and only with daily caps: 10 hands-free loops (each successful "listen" wake counts as one), 10 Advisory Board reviews, and 10 Verbative Shot captures per day, all resetting at 00:00 UTC. On Advanced, nothing is metered, counted, or capped: it's unlimited.
Does it work without internet?+
Claude Code CLI itself always needs the internet — that's Anthropic's API. What 'offline' means here is our licensing: Free has to ping our server per hands-free loop (so it goes down if we do); Advanced caches a signed license for 48 hours so our backend can be unreachable without locking you out of Advanced features.
Which platforms?+
macOS only at launch. Windows and Linux are on the roadmap — vote on the docs page.
Cancel anytime?+
Yes. One click in the customer portal. You keep Advanced until the end of the billing period, then drop back to the free tier with the same license.