Anthropic is launching a new feature for its AI-powered chatbot Claude, which will allow anyone to create an email assistant, a shoe shopping bot, or other custom solutions. It’s called “tool use” (or smarter “Call function”), and connects to any external API of your choice.
Although I’m not a huge fan of the term “AI agents,” that’s basically the game plan here. For example, the tool can analyze data to create personalized product recommendations based on a user’s purchase history or provide quick responses to customer inquiries, such as tracking order status or providing real-time technical support. To create an assistant, all you need is access to an application programming interface (API) and someone who knows how to code.
This tool can also work with images, allowing applications to analyze visual data. One example provided by Anthropic is that a virtual interior design consultant can use this tool to process images of a room and provide personalized decor suggestions.
This AI assistant will be available through Anthropic’s messaging API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI. Pricing is based on the volume of Cloud Text transactions, which are measured in “tokens.” usually, 1000 characters are equivalent to about 750 words. During the beta phase, most users chose Anthropic’s faster and less expensive option, Haiku, which costs about 25 cents per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens.
According to Dianne Penn, project lead at Anthropic, the team has been beta testing Claude’s tool since April with a few thousand customers. She foresees some great solutions for startups: One customer highlighted is Study Fetch, which it used to create a custom AI tutor called Spark.E.
AI assistants or agents (or whatever you call them) seem to be where this technology is headed. At Google I/O, the search giant unveiled all kinds of ways to let Google do your shopping and searching for you using artificial intelligence. At OpenAI, the company is working on Ha-Like a voice assistant that can respond in real time and monitor the world around you (in the demo, Suggest a change of clothes Before an important job interview.
Anthropic’s release of this new tool allows people to create various assistants to meet their needs, with or without Google and OpenAI.
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