Anthropic introduces a new feature for Claude-3, its family of artificial intelligence (AI) models. Called ‘Tool Usage’ (or function calls), this feature allows Claude to interact with external tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) to perform a wide variety of tasks. This way, the AI chatbot can perform more user-specific tasks, such as finding the best meeting based on participant availability and analyzing big financial data to offer future predictions and actionable insights.
A new feature of using the tool is the AI Agent, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs or the recently announced Gems and Copilot (via Copilot Studio) from Google and Microsoft. In essence, they are mini chatbots that can be created by adding an external database to become specialists in one particular task, unlike generalist chatbots that can do a bit of everything but have limited accuracy.
However, in Anthropic’s case, these AI agents work a little differently than their competitors. Instead of using natural language queries, users must use an API (for data) and code its functionality in Claude. While this may not be possible for everyone, those with enough coding knowledge can create powerful tools for calling functions for a variety of purposes.
The AI company has no internet access and is trained for offline data. So, users can also use Tool Use to add information about a recent sports event or conference to the workplace and have them analyze it. The tool is now generally available on all Claude-3 models on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
In a blog post, the AI company highlighted several business use cases for the tool. These range from retrieving specific details from a large database of invoices to reducing data entry workload to instantly responding to customer technical queries by accessing product details. But they can also be used for personal use.
For example, since Tool Use also accepts pictures as input, users can share a large album of pictures of themselves in different outfits along with details of the clothes they want to buy and ask the AI if they would look good on them. They can also ask more complex questions such as suggesting a five-day office outfit. Interestingly, the company claims that the Claude-3 can handle hundreds of simple tools and a smaller number of complex tools simultaneously.
With this release, most major AI companies have offered AI agents with their chatbots. If you want to experience these agents for free, the GPT Store is a good place to start because OpenAI has made it available globally, for free.
