New AI Things - Claude has Web Search Now and ...
ChatGPT can be the default assistant and Gemini does Audio Overview
Claude has consistently been seen as one of the closest rivals, or maybe the closest rival, to ChatGPT for as long as I’ve been obsessively following and using GenAI apps. It’s been my 1 or 1A with ChatGPT consistently as well.
One area where it started to lag behind ChatGPT and several others - Le Chat and Gemini just to name a couple - is that it was not able to search the web. It still always managed to serve up very strong responses, but obviously its knowledge cutoff date (which varied, but was generally at least a few months back from current day) combined with no web search capability, was dealbreaker when choosing an app to work with if you needed the most current information available on the web for a particular research effort.
Not anymore. I missed this news yesterday but saw it this morning and made a quick task: “Use the heck out of Claude”. Not that I don’t do a lot of that anyway, but it was a quick reminder to test out web search. It stumbled on my very first try on my phone:
You can see the web search symbol in the image on the left, and that I have it turned on under Tools in Settings in the image on the right. Not trying to be mean, but this made me think something along the lines of “it pulled a Gemini”. That seems to have been a one off though. I closed and re-opened the app and since then it’s working very well on Android, Mac desktop app, and its web app. Here are a couple good results on the phone, one for the impact on CISA (the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency) from recent government agency cuts and the other for news on what’s happening in the English Premier League this weekend.
It’s only been a handful of searches with Claude today, but so far, so good.
A couple other notable new AI things
ChatGPT can now be used as the default virtual assistant on Android. I’ve tried this out only a tiny but this week. Lightning impression on it: it’s ok. More than ok is that we now have three options for the assistant, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Gemini has the huge home field advantage with access to all the Google apps, but Perplexity was quite good despite that when I tried it out a couple months ago.
Gemini is rolling out three interesting new features:
Canvas - which will “write docs and code” apparently and sounds an awful lot the tool with the same name from ChatGPT and Artifacts in Claude.
A slight design tweak for the app
And …
The most promising one, the one I’m most excited to try out, is Audio Overview - a la NotebookLM.
As usual, there are dozens ( or way more than dozens) of other AI news items this week, but these are the ones that caught my eye and I have started to play with or lokk forward to playing with.
Not yet on iOS in the latest available built apparently. At least not in The Netherlands (Europe?).
Sorry to hear that. I know it's a pain when notable features or even devices roll out more slowly to particular areas. I lived in London for many years and experienced some of that.