Anthropic, the company behind the generative AI chatbot Claude has announced Tool Use which allows developers to make Claude more powerful. With Tool Use, Claude can interact with external tools and APIs, the feature is available on all Claude 3 models on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
The public-benefit company said that with Tool Use, Claude can perform a whole bunch of new tasks, manipulate data, and provide more dynamic and accurate responses. Explaining the feature a bit more, Anthropic said that developers can define a toolset for Claude and write out a request in natural language. Claude will then find the appropriate tools for the task and perform a corresponding action. Anthropic gave the following examples:
- Extract structured data from unstructured text: Pull names, dates, and amounts from invoices to reduce manual data entry.
- Convert natural language requests into structured API calls: Enable teams to self-serve common actions (e.g., "cancel subscription") with simple commands.
- Answer questions by searching databases or using web APIs: Provide instant, accurate responses to customer inquiries in support chatbots.
- Automate simple tasks through software APIs: Save time and minimize errors in data entry or file management.
- Orchestrate multiple fast Claude subagents for granular tasks: Automatically find the optimal meeting time based on attendee availability.
Anthropic said that it has been beta testing Tool Use with developers who use the powerful Claude 3 Opus model to build sophisticated user-facing assistants.
To be clear, for normal users interacting with Claude AI, there will be no difference in how the AI works. This tool use is aimed at developers leveraging Claude for various third-party services. One company that has been using Tool Use is StudyFetch, an AI-powered education platform which has an AI tutor called Spark.E, powered by Claude. Commenting on the improvements with Tool Use, Ryan Trattner, CTO and Co-Founder of StudyFetch, said:
“Claude with tool use is accurate and cost-effective, and now powers our live voice-enabled AI tutoring sessions. Within just a few days, we integrated tools into our platform. As a result, our AI tutor, Spark.E, acts agentically—displaying interactive UIs, tracking student progress in context, and navigating through lectures and materials. Since implementing Claude with tool use, we've observed a 42% increase in positive human feedback.”
If Claude Tool Use sounds interesting to you, you can start using it today on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. You can learn more in the documentation, Tool Use tutorial, and the Anthropic Cookbooks on Tool Use.
Source: Anthropic
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