How to Use Claude AI (A Real Rival to ChatGPT)

Claude AI is an exciting new AI chatbot created by Anthropic.

Claude is designed to converse naturally, answer questions intelligently, summarize long text, and assist users without being likely to produce harmful or biased outputs.

This makes Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot a more robust and safe AI assistant than other models like Google’s new BARD and OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT.

This guide will cover how to use Claude AI to enhance your productivity, creativity, and knowledge.

Getting Started with Accessing Claude AI

To start using Claude, you must create a Claude AI account on Anthropic’s website. 

Enter your email address or connect with your Google account.

You also need to enter your mobile phone number to get the verification code to access the system.

Claude is currently in an open beta phase and is available only in the US and UK.

Tip: You need a VPN software like NordVPN to access Claude AI outside the US or UK. Also, you must get the verification code somehow because the system allows only sending it to those country numbers.

How to Use Claude AI Chatbot at a Glanze

After creating your account and logging into the Claude app or website, you’ll be greeted with a simple chat interface to start conversing with Claude.

You can chat naturally as if talking to a real person, asking Claude complex questions, having casual conversations, asking for summarized bullet reports of lengthy articles or documents, and more.

One of Claude’s strengths compared to other AI chatbots is its ability to provide short, concise answers and longer, detailed responses depending on your queries and preferences.

This robust conversational capacity stems from Anthropic’s focus on research and safety when developing AI assistants.

1. Begin with Your First Query

Type in your question or request, and click the arrow button to get your answer from Claude.

You can try again if you are not satisfied with the result. Use the ‘Retry‘ button beneath the answer if you want Claude to reattempt.

2. Copying and Reporting Responses

Use the ‘Copy‘ button to use the response elsewhere by copying it to the clipboard. ChatGPT doesn’t have a copy button – it beats me why.

If the result is nonsense or otherwise inaccurate, you can report issues with the answer by selecting the thumbs-down icon and specifying the problem.

3. Continuing or Restarting Conversations

Continue by asking more questions.

Start a new conversation by selecting the ‘Open Menu’ on the top left or pressing CTRL-K from your keyboard.

4. Ask About Contemporary Events

You can engage Claude with questions on recent topics, and it will offer the latest insights. 

For instance, if you ask Claude about the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it will not only identify the recipient but also provide significant details about their notable works and achievements.

This is something that ChatGPT’s free version cannot do.

Example prompt: “Who was the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?“

Claude’s answer (not complete):

The most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is Annie Ernaux.

Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature on October 6, 2022. She is a French author who won the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory…”

ChatGPT’s answer:

As of my last update in September 2021, I don’t have information on the Nobel Prize in Literature winner for 2022. You might want to check the official Nobel Prize website or other reliable sources for up-to-date information on the 2022 laureates.

Note: You can access the Internet with ChatGPT plugins like Webpilot to scrape the latest information. To do that, you need to have a paid version of ChatGPT.

5. Get Web Page Summaries

The best practice is to copy-paste the actual content of a web page as a message to Claude rather than the URL to avoid potential mistakes in the response. Note that Claude cannot directly access to the Internet.

Once you have copied the text, paste the content into Claude’s prompt. Initiate the chat and let Claude summarize or answer specifics.

Note: if there is a lot of text, it will be inserted as an attachment as in the picture.

6. Upload Files for Summaries

That is the feature that Claude excels at compared to ChatGPT because it doesn’t have an upload option, even in the paid version.

You can upload up to five files (max 10MB each) in formats like PDF, TXT, DOCX, etc. (Excel isn’t supported, but CSV is). Click on the paper clip icon to upload and get a summary or ask something specific.

Tip: Claude’s responses improve when you ask specific questions about the uploads.

7. Managing Conversations

Use the ‘Open Menu’ to see previous chats. Then, you can view, rename, or delete them.

8. Need Help?

If you need assistance, click your profile icon on the top right. Select ‘Help & Support’ for articles and guidance to make the best out of Claude.

Key Features and Abilities of the Claude AI

Anthropic Claude boasts an impressive array of features and abilities that make it a versatile personal assistant. Some of the key capabilities include:

• Conversational Intelligence: Claude can engage in natural conversations on a wide range of topics, from sports and pop culture to intricate scientific ideas. This capability ensures both free-flowing dialogues and direct question-answering.
• Natural Language Processing: Claude AI can comprehend and respond to conversational English without the need for specific commands or keywords.
• General Knowledge: Trained on an extensive range of topics, Claude can discuss everything from current events to history. It is consistently updating its knowledge base.
• Text Summarization: Whether it’s a research paper, article, or any long text, Claude can distill the essential points, offering concise summaries. This is invaluable for quickly understanding large volumes of data.
• Writing Aid: Claude is a valuable writing partner, aiding in tasks such as creating outlines, rephrasing, expanding prompts, and addressing writer’s block.
• Reasoning and Analysis: Claude can dissect information, follow logical patterns, make inferences, and elucidate its thought process when asked. This results in coherent, comprehensive conversations.
• Harm Avoidance: Prioritizing user safety, Claude is built to evade generating biased, incorrect, unsafe, or harmful outputs. This commitment ensures a level of reliability surpassing many AI models.
• API Access: While Claude 2 offers API access, it’s currently limited to enterprise users, excluding individual developers.

Claude AI has a context window of 100,000 tokens, allowing it to retain that many textual units in its short-term memory during a conversation.

A token can be a word, number, or punctuation mark. This means Claude can consider the most recent 100,000 tokens when crafting responses.

Note: Anthropic offers two different AI models at the time of writing this: Claude and Claude Instant. Claude is a state-of-the-art high-performance model, while Claude Instant is a lighter, less expensive, and much faster option. This guide focuses solely on Claude.

If you have come across the term Claude 2, it is just a version number of the Claude AI model.

Here is a quick comparison of some of Claude AI’s potential pros and cons compared to ChatGPT

Claude’s Potential Pros

• More robust safety – Claude is designed by Anthropic to avoid biased, incorrect, or harmful output.
• Can summarize long text – it is skilled at digesting and summarizing large documents.
• Discuss latest events – it has up-to-date real-time knowledge of current events.
• Claude’s user interface is more sleek and user-friendly than ChatGPT’s in my opinion.
• More conversational – dialogues aim to be more natural and in-depth.

Claude’s Potential Cons

• Claude can have conversations only in English.
• Less capable with code – Claude’s coding abilities may not be on par with ChatGPT’s yet.
• Smaller knowledge base – the training data is likely less extensive than ChatGPT’s at this point.
• Limited availability – still in a limited beta, while ChatGPT is widely accessible.
• Less creative – ChatGPT may be better at more artistic or imaginative tasks.
• No internet access – Claude can’t look up external information online.

Frequently Asked Questions about Claude AI

Is Claude better than ChatGPT?

Claude and ChatGPT have different strengths. Claude focuses more on safety through its Constitutional AI approach. It aims to avoid harmful, untruthful, or unethical responses.

ChatGPT is very capable but can sometimes generate concerning outputs. Overall, Claude prioritizes trustworthiness in a way ChatGPT currently does not.

Is Claude free to use?

Currently, yes Claude is free to try during its beta testing period. Anthropic plans to offer both free and paid tiers of access once Claude is officially launched. The free version will enable basic conversations, while paid plans will offer more advanced features.

Is Is Claude good for coding?

Not exactly. While Claude can discuss coding concepts, it does not actually write or execute code. It is an AI assistant focused on natural language conversations, not a specialized tool for writing computer programs. For coding help, dedicated code generation tools may be better suited.

Can Claude 2 access the Internet?

No, Claude 2 is limited to the knowledge in its training data and does not have live access to the Internet or external information sources. However, Anthropic continues to expand Claude’s knowledge base to enable more informative conversations over time.

What is Constitutional AI?

Constitutional AI is the principle of creating AI with defined constraints that shape its behavior in safe, beneficial ways from the ground up through both training and design. This promotes reliability and trustworthiness.

Wrapping Up

Claude AI provides a robust AI assistant focused on natural conversations, versatility, and safety.

With its powerful conversational abilities and range of customizable features, Claude can help with productivity, learning, writing, programming, and more.

Sign up for an account on Anthropic’s website to gain access to this innovative chatbot and start experiencing responsible AI designed to augment human intelligence.

Claude represents an exciting new chapter in safe and beneficial AI applications.