Joel Lewenstein, product design manager at Anthropic, was recently crawling under his new home to adjust the irrigation system when he encountered a conundrum: The buttons on the device didn’t make any sense. Instead of scouring the internet for a product manual, he opened Anthropic’s Claude chatbot app on his phone and took a photo. Its algorithms analyzed the image and provided more context about what each button could do.
When I tested OpenAI’s image features for ChatGPT last year, I found them just as useful, at least for low-stakes tasks. I recommend turning to AI image analysis to identify those random cords around your house, but not to guess the identity of a loose prescription pill.
Anthropic released the iOS app that helped Lewenstein to be downloaded by everyone earlier this month. I decided to try the Claude app, in line with a goal I had set to experiment with a wider variety of chatbots this year. And I video chatted with Lewenstein to see what advice he had for getting started with Claude and how to ask questions in a way that gets the most helpful answers.
Chat
Decades of Google search dominating the web have taught us to type direct, concise queries when we want something. To get the most out of chatbots like Claude, you need to avoid this approach. “It’s not Google search,” says Lewenstein. “So you don’t enter three keywords, you really have a conversation with that.” It encourages users to avoid an overly utilitarian communication style and be a little more wordy in their prompts. Instead of one short sentence, try writing prompts that are a few sentences or even a few paragraphs long.
To share photos
AI image analysis is still relatively new to Anthropic’s chatbot (it launched in March), but it can be a powerful way to quickly ask the chatbot questions. Lewenstein recommends using the images as a starting point for conversations with Claude, as he did under his house. While the feature isn’t always accurate, it’s useful and fun if you keep the limitations in mind and look for opportunities where an image can answer your query.
Be direct
Still not getting the results you want? A solid troubleshooting technique is to be overly prescriptive in your prompts. “Just talking to Claude as a person confuses you a little,” Lewenstein says. Instead, try giving Claude some almost awkward context about how you want the answer formatted, for example, saying it should be in bullet points or short paragraphs, and give him some clear instructions on the tone she should use. Do you want lyrical answers or something that seems more technical? Also remember to tell Claude who the target audience is and what their level of knowledge on the subject may be.
Try, try again
If your initial request to Claude doesn’t produce a good result, keep in mind that your first request is only the starting point. Follow-up prompts and clarifying questions are essential for steering a chatbot in the right direction.
When interacting with a chatbot, I quickly start a new conversation thread if things go wrong, so I can try a different opening prompt. That’s not the best approach, Lewenstein says.
He suggests staying in that same chat window and providing direct feedback to the bot about what you’d like to do differently, from tone to structure. “I literally type, ‘No, it’s too complicated.’ I don’t understand what these words mean. Can you try again, but simplify it a little more,” Lewenstein says, referring to a time when Claude’s summary of a document was confusing.
Download large documents
Speaking of documents, Claude’s ability to analyze uploaded data is one of his strengths. The applications are most obvious in workplace use cases, where the chatbot can help with Excel spreadsheets and overflowing inboxes, but it can also be a useful feature outside of the office. If you download batches of text, Claude can spot trends you might not have noticed otherwise. Ask the chatbot to look for patterns in language usage or topics being discussed. Do you have a PDF that you need to read, but it’s so long that your eyes are widening? Claude can help you focus your attention on the most important aspect of the document first.
I uploaded the verbatim transcript of my conversation with Lewenstein to Claude and asked him what quotes it would highlight as important. The chatbot did an impeccable job of capturing key themes of the conversation and flagged many quotes that I ultimately decided to pull for this newsletter. (Anthropic’s policies mean that, unless you opt-in, your input data is unlikely to be used to train its AI models.)
Text like you’re friends
Yes, you should play around by writing longer, more Claude-specific prompts, but it’s also a good idea to approach conversations with chatbots as a volley of back-and-forth messages. “I actually find the mobile app to be a very natural form factor, because you’re chatting with people on your phone all the time,” Lewenstein says.
When I uploaded a photo to the Claude app of a robot mural I saw at a cool bar in San Francisco, the chatbot provided a poetic description of the art. He wasn’t able to guess what city the bar was in, a near-impossible task, but the pace of the conversation made it feel like sending a message to an enthusiastic friend. Claude thanked me when I finally revealed the location of the bar: “My assumptions were delightfully shattered. »
I need to use it more to fully understand Claude, but I already have the impression that the chatbot outputs have a friendly feel. While ChatGPT is still my favorite chatbot, I could see myself adding Claude to the mix when I want to send messages with an AI tool that prioritizes engaging, human-sounding results over a dryer communication style and efficient. It’s important to stay open to using AI tools you haven’t tried before. Chatbots continue to improve and evolve rapidly, so it’s far too early to lock yourself into a single tool.