Anthropic is releasing a new feature for its AI chatbot, Claude, which will allow anyone to create email assistants, shoe-buying robots, or other personalized solutions. It's called "Tool Usage" (or more professionally, "Function Invocation"), and it can connect to any external API of your choice. This feature is essentially an "AI agent." For example, this tool can analyze data and create personalized product recommendations based on a user's purchase history, or provide quick responses to customer queries, such as tracking order status or offering real-time technical support. To launch an assistant, it only requires access to an API and someone who knows how to program. Furthermore, this tool can also handle images, making applications that analyze visual data possible. An example given by Anthropic is that virtual interior designers can use this tool to process room images and provide personalized decoration suggestions. This AI assistant will be available through Anthropic's Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI. Pricing is based on the amount of text processed by Claude, measured in "tokens." Typically, 1000 tokens are equivalent to approximately 750 words. During the testing phase, most users opted for Anthropic's fastest and most affordable option, Haiku, which costs around 25 cents per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens. Dianne Penn, the project lead at Anthropic, stated that the team has been beta testing the Claude tool since April, with thousands of customers participating. She expects to see some interesting startup solutions, with Study Fetch being one of the key clients who utilized this tool to build a personalized AI tutor named Spark.E. AI assistants or agents seem to be the direction of this technology's development. At the Google I/O conference, the search giant showcased various ways of using AI for shopping and searching. At OpenAI, the company is developing a voice assistant similar to Her, which can respond in real-time and observe the world around you (in one demonstration, it suggested changing clothes before an important interview). Anthropic's release of this new tool allows people to create assistants that cater to their needs, regardless of whether they use Google or OpenAI.