Anthropic is rolling out a new feature for Claude-3, its family of artificial intelligence (AI) models. Dubbed ‘Tool Use’ (or Function Calling), this feature enables 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 tasks which are more specific to the user, such as finding the best meeting based on attendee availability and analysing large financial data to offer future predictions and actionable insights.
The new Tool Use feature is an AI Agent, similar to GPTs by OpenAI or recently announced Gems and Copilot (via Copilot Studio) by Google and Microsoft, respectively. Essentially, these are mini chatbots that can be created by adding an external database to make them specialists in one particular task, unlike the generalist chatbots which can do a little bit of everything but have limited accuracy.
In Anthropic’s case, however, these AI agents work slightly differently than their competitors. Instead of using natural language prompts, users must utilise an API (for the data) and code its functionality into Claude. While this might not be possible for everyone, those with sufficient knowledge of coding can create powerful function-calling tools for various purposes.
The AI firm does not have access to the internet and is trained on offline data. So, users can also use Tool Use to add information about a recent sporting event or a workplace conference and get it to analyse the same. The tool is now generally available across all the Claude-3 models on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
In a blog post, the AI firm highlighted several business-related use cases for the tool. These range from finding particular details from a large database of invoices to reducing data entry workload to responding to technical customer queries instantly by accessing product details. But these can also be used for personal use.
For example, since Tool Use also accepts images as input, users can share a large album of their pictures in different outfits along with details of outfits they want to purchase and ask the AI whether these would look good on them. They can also ask more complex queries such as suggesting a 5-day office outfit suggestion. Interestingly, the company claims Claude-3 can handle hundreds of simple tools and a smaller number of complex tools simultaneously.
With this release, most of the major AI firms have offered AI agents with their chatbots. If you wish to experience these agents for free, the GPT Store is a good place to start as OpenAI has made it available globally, free of cost.