Anthropic’s Tool Use Feature Enhances Claude’s Capabilities

Anthropic is introducing a new feature for its chatbot Claude called “tool use” or “function calling,” for the technically inclined.

This latest addition to the platform allows users to develop personalized chatbots for various purposes, including email assistance and shoe shopping. The chatbots can connect to external APIs, expanding their functionality and potential use cases.

Anthropic’s tool can analyze purchase histories to recommend products or provide quick customer support. Additionally, it can process images, enabling applications such as virtual try-ons for clothing or virtual makeup consultations based on selfies.

Platform Availability

Claude’s new features are available through Anthropic’s Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI. Pricing is based on text volume, measured in “tokens.”

During the beta phase, most users opted for the affordable Haiku option, costing 25 cents per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens.

Dianne Penn, project lead at Anthropic, noted that the tool has been in beta testing since April with a few thousand customers. One notable example is Study Fetch, which developed Spark, a personalized AI tutor.

Anthropic’s tool aligns with industry trends showcased at Google I/O and by OpenAI, indicating a shift towards more integrated and responsive AI assistants.

Sure, we’ve seen this sort of thing before with OpenAI’s GPTs, but this is interesting because it puts them in direct competition with their counterpart, and they seem to be holding their own.

I mean, think about it: Google is completely upside down right now, while Anthropic is out here pushing out new features that actually work. Go figure.

Anthropic says that tool use is now broadly available across the entire Claude 3 model family.

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