iPhone's Hot, New AI App? It's Not for You, It's for Your Work
Anthropic is pitching its AI chatbot as a "really smart coworker" that will help you get your work done faster.
Since the release of the Claude 3 family of AI chatbots in March to challenge stalwarts like ChatGPT and Gemini, AI startup Anthropic says it's seen a surge in adoption, including by enterprise users. Now it wants to capitalize on that with the introduction of a Team plan and an iOS app.
Claude 3 is particularly adept, Anthropic says, at analysis and forecasting, content creation, code generation, and conversing in languages like Spanish, Japanese and French in addition to English. The chatbots in this family can also handle more complicated queries with higher accuracy and enhanced contextual understanding than previous models, the company says.
Anthropic has said Claude 3 exhibits "human-like understanding" -- a quality that can be applied to AI chatbots in general to varying degrees, and it's a key part of what's driving the infatuation with them among businesses and the general public.
In his review, CNET's Imad Kahn calls Claude "the most conversational AI engine." He notes that Claude is not sentient, of course. "But it certainly feels sentient," he says, because it "answers questions in contemplative ways and also goes out of its way to ask you follow-up questions and your opinions."
(For more reviews of generative AI tools, along with all the latest AI news, tips and explainers, see CNET's new AI Atlas guide.)
We're seeing increased interest in generative AI at work. On Monday, for instance, Amazon announced its own generative AI business assistant, Q. Meanwhile, research from Boston Consulting Group found that 70% of respondents are excited about gen AI at work as 60% believe it will help them learn on the job and 55% expect it to help them work faster.
Among the companies integrating Claude are biopharmaceutical company Pfizer, which is using the chatbot in its work to fight cancer, as well as the PGA Tour, which built an AI platform to help produce content for golf fans.
Scott White, product lead at Anthropic, refers to Claude as "a really smart coworker that helps me do my best work way faster."
The Team plan
Claude's Team plan allows business users to give employees access to the Claude 3 model family.
IT includes greater usage limits compared to the Pro plan and is $30 per user per month with a minimum of five seats. (Pro is $20 a month.)
The Team plan includes a 200,000-context window -- which refers to how much information the model can recall in a given session -- and, according to a blog post, allows businesses to process long documents, discuss complex topics like financial forecasting or product roadmapping and maintain multistep conversations regarding customer support or project planning.
Anthropic noted that additional features -- including citations to verify AI-generated claims, integrations with data repositories like codebases or CRMs and the ability to iterate with teammates on AI-generated documents or projects -- will be released "in the coming weeks."
At that point, a marketing team, for example, could feed its audience style guide, product requirements and FAQs to Claude, which could then access those data sources to brainstorm copy for a blog post about an upcoming product launch.
"When I come to the office and I have a document I need to write, it usually starts with me providing Claude access to some of my documents or way of thinking and then brainstorming with Claude," White said.
Claude on iOS
In addition, Anthropic has released a free iOS app for Claude users across all plans.
According to the blog post, it offers the same experience as the mobile web, including syncing your chat history and support for taking and uploading photos.
"The mobile app is just a new way to make it easier to reach for Claude whenever I'm trying to solve a particular problem," White said. "You might, on your way to work, Slack a coworker talking about a particular thing that you need to solve or getting advice on something. You might do that with Claude, too."
One advantage within the app versus the mobile experience is a camera integration, which lets you take photos of, say, a conference room whiteboard to easily share with Claude.
"That'll automatically get uploaded in the Claude knowledge base for you to then do particular work with," White said. "It's just an easier, quicker way to get access and always be authenticated in the system."
White said an Android version is "very much on our roadmap," but declined to share a release date.
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