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Joel Lewenstein, head of product design at Anthropic, was recently crawling under his new house to adjust the irrigation system when he ran into a conundrum: The knobs on the device didn’t make sense. Instead of searching the Internet for a product manual, he opened Anthropic’s Claude chatbot app on his phone and took a photo. His algorithms analyzed the image and provided more context about what each knob could do.
When I tested OpenAI’s image functions for ChatGPT last year, I found them equally useful, at least for low-risk tasks. I would recommend that you turn to AI image analysis to identify those random wires in your house, but not to guess the identity of a loose prescription pill.
Anthropic liberation the iOS app which helped everyone download Lewenstein earlier this month. I decided to try the Claude app, in line with the goal I had set for myself to experiment with a wider variety of chatbots this year. And I video chatted with Lewenstein to see what tips he had for getting started with Claude and how to ask questions in a way that gets you the most helpful answers.
Get chatty
Decades of mastering Google Search on the web have trained us to write strong, concise queries when we want something. To get the most out of chatbots like Claude, you need to break free from that approach. “It’s not Google Search,” Lewenstein says. “So you’re not putting in three keywords, you’re actually having a conversation with them.” It encourages users to avoid an overly utilitarian communication style and to be a little more detailed with their directions. Instead of a short sentence, try writing prompts that are a few sentences or even a couple of paragraphs long.
Image analysis with AI is still quite new for The Anthropic chatbot—it was released in March—but can provide a powerful way to quickly ask questions to the chatbot. Lewenstein recommends using images as a starting point for conversations with Claude, as he did under her house. Although the feature may not always be accurate, it is useful (and fun) if you are aware of the limitations and look for opportunities where an image can address your query.
Be direct
Still not getting the results you want? A solid problem-solving technique is to be overly prescriptive in your prompts. “Just talking to Claude as a person leads you a little astray,” Lewenstein says. Instead, try giving Claude an almost uncomfortable amount of context about how you’d like the answer to be formatted; for example, telling him that they should be in bullet points or short paragraphs, and give him clear instructions about the tone he should use. Do you want lyrical responses or something more technical sounding? Also, consider telling Claude who the target audience is and what their level of knowledge on the topic may be.
Try it, try it again
If your initial consultation with Claude does not produce a good result, please note that your first consultation is only the starting point. Follow-up prompts and clarifying questions are essential for steering a chatbot in the right direction.
When interacting with any chatbot, I can quickly start a new conversation thread if the result goes wrong, so I can try a different opening message. This is not the best approach, says Lewenstein.
He suggests staying in the same chat window and providing direct feedback to the bot about what you’d like done differently, from tone to structure. “I literally just write, ‘No, too complicated.’ I don’t understand what these words mean. Can you try it again, but simplify it one more level?” says Lewenstein, referring to a time when Claude’s summary of a document was confusing.
Upload large documents
Speaking of documents, Claude’s ability to analyze uploaded data is one of his strengths. The applications for this are most obvious for workplace use cases, where the chatbot can help with Excel spreadsheets and overflowing email inboxes, but it can also be a useful feature outside the office. If you upload batches of text, Claude can detect trends that you would not have otherwise noticed. Ask the chatbot to look for patterns in language use or topics covered. Do you have a PDF you need to read but it’s so long your eyes glaze over? Claude can help you focus your attention first on the most important aspect of the document.
I uploaded the text transcript of my conversation with Lewenstein to Claude and asked him which quotes he would highlight as important. The chatbot did an impeccable job of capturing the key themes of the conversation and flagged many of the quotes that I ultimately decided to include in this newsletter. (Anthropic policies mean that, unless you chooseyour input data is unlikely to be used to train your AI models).
Send text messages as if they were friends
Yes, you should play around with writing longer, more specific messages to Claude, but it’s also smart to approach conversations with chatbots as a barrage of back-and-forth messages. “I actually find the mobile app to be a really natural form factor, because you’re chatting with people all the time on your phone,” Lewenstein says.
When I uploaded a photo of a robot mural I saw in a cool San Francisco bar In the Claude app, the chatbot provided a poetic description of the art. He wasn’t able to guess what city the bar was located in, a nearly impossible task, but the cadence of the conversation did feel like texting an anxious friend. Claude thanked me when I finally revealed the location of the bar: “My assumptions changed delightfully.”
I need to use it more to really understand Claude, but I already feel like the chatbot’s outputs have a friendly style. While ChatGPT remains my chatbot of choice, I could see myself adding Claude to the mix when I want to message with an AI tool that prioritizes engaging, human-sounding results over a drier, more efficient communication style. It’s important to stay open to using AI tools that you haven’t tried before. Chatbots continue to improve and change rapidly, so it’s too early to limit yourself to just one tool.
