6 Practical Tips for Using Anthropic's Claude Chatbot

Joel Lewenstein, a head of product design at Anthropic, was recently crawling beneath his new house to adjust the irrigation system when he ran into a conundrum: The device’s knobs made no sense. Instead of scouring the internet for a product manual, he opened up the app for Anthropic’s Claude chatbot on his phone and snapped a photo. Its algorithms analyzed the image and provided more context for what each knob might do.

Sign Up TodayThis is an edition of WIRED's Fast Forward newsletter, a weekly dispatch from the future by Will Knight, exploring AI advances and other technology set to change our lives. This week, WIRED service writer Reece Rogers is filling in.

When I tested OpenAI’s image features for ChatGPT last year, I found it similarly useful—at least for low-stakes tasks. I’d recommend you turn to AI image analysis for identifying those random cords around your house, but not to guess the identity of a loose prescription pill.

Anthropic released the iOS app that helped out Lewenstein for all to download earlier this month. I decided to try out the Claude app, in line with a goal I’d set to experiment with a wider variety of chatbots this year. And I chatted over video with Lewenstein to see what advice he had for getting started with Claude and how to ask questions in a way that elicit the most useful answers.

Get Chatty

Decades of Google Search dominating the web has trained us to type blunt and concise queries when we want something. To get the most out of chatbots like Claude, you need to break free from that approach. “It's not Google Search,” Lewenstein says. “So you're not putting in three keywords—you're really having a conversation with it.” He encourages users to avoid an overly utilitarian communication style and to get a little more verbose with their prompts. Instead of a short phrase, try writing prompts that are a few sentences long or even a couple of paragraphs.

Share Photos

AI image analysis is still fairly new for Anthropic’s chatbot—it was released in March—but it can provide a powerful way to quickly pose questions to the chatbot. Lewenstein recommends using images as a launching point for conversations with Claude, like he did under