Claude is one of the AI ​​platforms at the forefront of the creative AI revolution: it has become the AI ​​of choice for many coders, and is moving towards agent AI that can also take actions for users. It’s also really easy to use, and even opens with a warm and familiar greeting (“Back at it” when I last loaded it). However you use the cloud, there are a number of features and tools worth learning about that can help you delve deeper into AI’s capabilities. Whether it’s letting Claude rummage through your emails, adjusting how Claude responds, or putting Claude to work in your web browser, there’s a lot to explore outside of the basic prompt box.

Integrate Claude with Gmail to help you manage your inbox.

Connectors enable Cloud to connect itself to other apps, and there are many of them, including Spotify, Canva, Tripadvisor, and Uber. You can add a new connector to the cloud by clicking. + (plus) button in the lower-left corner of the prompt box, then select Connectors > Add Connector..

The Gmail connector is particularly useful. If you give Cloud access to your inbox, AI can perform tasks like summarizing your daily messages, or identifying emails that need to be answered. You can try “Which email sender should I leave unread the most in my Gmail account?” For example, or “Find emails in Gmail in the last 30 days that look like they need a response.”

Use Cloud to create interactive visualizations to promote learning.

Claude showing how sound waves work.
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Claude AI can’t create images the way ChatGPT and Gemini can, but it is capable of creating diagrams, charts and visualizations and making them interactive. A great way to use it is when you’re learning about something: you can get Claude to create an interactive diagram of a volcano, for example, or a timeline of 1990s music that you can scroll through.

A prompt like “Make me an interactive visualization explaining how sound waves work” will show what Claude can do. What you get in return is a simple animation showing how sound waves work, and sliders to adjust the frequency and amplitude of the sound waves so you can see the difference.

Prepare your tips to make sure Claude checks his sources.

Cloud generally does a good job of pulling and synthesizing information from the web—you can be sure that it searches online. + button in the prompt box, then “Web Search”—but he doesn’t always have a complete idea of ​​the sources he’s looking at.

A little quick hack can help here. If you’re searching the web, make it clear that Claude should focus mainly on the latest information from the most well-known website publishers (you can specify them if you like). It’s also a good idea to add a note to avoid hearsay and speculation, and should mean that Claude’s answers are more reliable. Claude will embed web links in his answers for reference, so you can check if he did what he was told.

Define a style to customize Claude’s responses.

Choose the style you like.
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Click on + button in the corner of the prompt box, then select Use styles.and you’ll see that there are several different styles in which you can get a response from Claude: to learn, comprehensive, Descriptiveand formal. There is also one Create and edit styles. Option to add your own. You may want to create a style where Claude responds with short, snappy, and to-the-point answers, or a style where Claude uses very simple language to explain complex topics. If you want, you can also set a style where Claude talks like a pirate.

Use Claude’s “skills” to help complete certain jobs.

There is another feature in the skill cloud that can make a huge difference to you outsmarting the AI. They’re basically sets of instructions that you can call when needed — saving you from having to type the instructions every time.

For example, you can use a skill to guide the tone and complexity of language to use when writing responses, or include instructions for reformatting and summarizing meeting notes with specific topics or section lengths. Another useful skill is the custom dictionary, where Claude can save definitions and bring them back when needed.

The skills can be quite advanced and include coding, but the easiest way to get started is to + button in the prompt box, then select Skills > Add Skills.. You will find that there is actually a skill generator that you can use, which allows you to create skills through natural language prompts.

Stop Claude from training your conversation.

You can opt out of using your chats as training data.
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It’s not about getting Claude to do something, it’s about him. to stop Instead, specifically, preventing Claude from using your cues to train its AI models. Click your user account name (bottom left), then select Settings > Privacyand disable the labeled feature. Help Claude improve.. That way, you’ll know that your conversation is used only for your own purposes — not to help Anthropic improve its models.

Create cloud chat links to make the experience a bit more collaborative

Look in the upper right corner of any chat, and you Share it. Click the button, and you can create a public link to the chat that you can send to other people, or even post on the web. This is a read-only share though, so it’s more for disseminating information than collaborating on ideas. Anything you add to a conversation after sharing won’t show up on the shared link, although it will show up when you unshare a chat and then share it again. In this way, resharing links can make the experience a bit more collaborative: if others have input, you can ask Claude, allow him to respond, then reshare the chat link. To manage the chats you’ve shared with the wider world, click your account name (bottom left) then Settings > Privacy And Manage. to the Shared chats.

Use Cloud to create an Excel file to help you with your monthly budget.

Cloud can generate entire files in just a few minutes.
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Claude is capable of creating Word and Excel files from a single prompt, so you can use it to create a report on the state of the semiconductor industry or a chart showing the achievements of your favorite sports team in just a few minutes. You can use this feature to create templates that you can fill out as needed. For example, ask Claude to “create an Excel file for family financial planning, with room to enter basic income and expenses” and you’ll get a fully formatted spreadsheet that you can update.

Use Claude’s browser extension to find the perfect hotel for your trip.

Cloud has a browser extension that you can install in Chrome or any Chromium-based browser (like Microsoft Edge). You can then assign it tasks like navigating websites, filling out forms, extracting data and so on. The add-on will ask for approval for larger actions, like making a purchase, and you can get it to ask for approval for every action by selecting it. Ask before you act. In the prompt box that pops up when you start the extension.

A cloud extension can do a lot. One helpful task a bot can perform is to look at a list of hotels on a website and decide which one is right for you, based on the criteria you give (price, what the AI ​​already knows about you, and any other information you want to add).

Go incognito to chat privately with Claude.

Go incognito and Claude will forget who you are.
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Sometimes you don’t want your chats with Claude to be on the record, to remove any traces of them, and to prevent Claude from referring to them in the future. When you start a new chat, click the little ghost icon in the top right corner to go incognito. To return to normal, click . x In the top right corner. Your incognito chats are not used for training, But maintained by Anthropic for 30 days. Before being deleted