You Can Use Voice with Claude now, and there are Claude apps for Mac and Windows
This is very good news if you’re a user of Claude. But just in case, you have no idea who or what Claude is, the Claude being referred to here is:
Probably ChatGPT’s closest rival
The company behind it, Anthropic, describes it like so: “Claude is a family of highly performant and intelligent AI models built by Anthropic. While Claude is powerful and extensible, it’s also the most trustworthy and reliable AI available.”
It has consistently been at or near the top of the chart in many of the most common areas that GenAI chatbots are benchmarked on.
Recently it has drawn a number of strong reviews for its abilities in both creative efforts and coding
In my own use, Claude has been right there with ChatGPT as my most used GenAI app for quite a few months now. I’m happy to see we can now enter prompts/queries into the Claude mobile apps with voice. It doesn’t reply in voice, but given the speed of its text replies that’s not a concern.
The first *very* good thing to note about the Claude Mac app is that you do not have to get it through the App Store. I’m a big fan of not being tied to App Store purchases and subscriptions.
Anthropic shared a couple more Claude good news items today. These:
Claude understands visual PDFs
Claude can now view images within a PDF, in addition to text. This helps Claude more accurately understand complex documents, such as those laden with charts or graphics.
For example:
Marketers can analyze reports with charts and graphs to assess ROI across different channels and campaigns.
Engineers can understand system architectures and workflows from diagrams and flowcharts in technical specifications.
Sales teams can prepare for client presentations by analyzing client’s strategy documents to extract key business objectives for tailored pitches.
Product managers can review user surveys and feedback reports with charts to identify common pain points and highly requested features.
Visual PDFs are supported in feature preview across all Claude.ai plans and the Anthropic API.
Claude Pro annual pricing plan (US only)
Take advantage of all that Claude has to offer with Claude Pro—which now has an annual billing option where you can save 10%. The annual plan is $216 per year, which works out to $18 per month. For now, the annual plan is available only to users based in the United States. To upgrade to Claude Pro, visit https://claude.ai/upgrade.
I did a very quick tryout of the ability to understand visuals in PDFs, using a fairly lengthy report on activating cybersecurity defenses, and Claude did well with it - including some of the notable visual elements when I asked for key takeaways from the report.