Enabling Claude Code's voice mode in WSL

Kenny Chou · March 28, 2026

LLMs   Claude Code

Claude Code now ships with a native /voice command, which performs speech to text (poorly) within the Claude Code CLI. Nevertheless, this feature is not available in WSL by default because Claude Code isn’t able to detect audio input.

To fix this, we bridge ALSA → PulseAudio:

1. Install the required utils:

   sudo apt install libasound2-plugins pulseaudio-util alsa-utils
   

2. Create or edit ~/.soundrc:

   touch ~/.soundrc # create
   nano ~/.soundrc # edit
   

3. Then paste:

   pcm.default pulse
   ctl.default pulse
   pcm.!default pulse
   ctl.!default pulse
   

   Note: if you followed the nano ~/.soundrc command blindly, save and exit the editor with ctrl+s then crtl+x.

4. Verify it works:

   arecord -L        # should list devices via PulseAudio
   aplay -L          # same for playback
   

Then restart Claude Code and try /voice again. The ALSA plugin routes all ALSA calls through PulseAudio, so apps that check for ALSA devices will find them.