Anthropic's Claude 3 Enhances Functionality with New Tool Use Feature

Anthropic has announced the general availability of tool use across the entire Claude 3 model family. This new feature, now accessible through the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI, enables Claude to interact with external tools and APIs for performing tasks, manipulating data, and delivering more dynamic and accurate responses, according to Anthropic.

Tool Use Capabilities

The tool use feature allows users to define a toolset for Claude and specify requests in natural language. Claude then selects the appropriate tool to fulfill the task and executes the corresponding actions. Key functionalities include:

• Extracting structured data from unstructured text: For instance, pulling names, dates, and amounts from invoices to reduce manual data entry.
• Converting natural language requests into structured API calls: Enabling teams to self-serve common actions with simple commands.
• Answering questions by searching databases or using web APIs: Providing instant and accurate responses to customer inquiries in support chatbots.
• Automating tasks through software APIs: Saving time and minimizing errors in data entry or file management.
• Orchestrating multiple Claude subagents for granular tasks: Automatically finding the optimal meeting time based on attendee availability.

Enhanced Developer Experience

Anthropic has also introduced features to help developers customize the end-user experience when leveraging the intelligence of the Claude 3 models. These features include:

• Tool use with streaming: Reducing wait times to create more engaging interactions, such as real-time responses in customer support chatbots.
• Forced tool use: Allowing developers to instruct Claude on tool selection, creating more targeted and efficient applications.
• Image tool use: Enabling Claude to incorporate image inputs in live applications.

During the beta phase, developers used Opus to build sophisticated user-facing assistants. Opus now includes <thinking> tags in its outputs to clarify Claude’s reasoning and simplify debugging for developers. However, the Claude 3 models currently do not support parallel tool calls.

Customer Success Stories

StudyFetch

StudyFetch, an AI-native learning platform, leverages Claude's tool use capabilities to power its personalized AI tutor, Spark.E. By integrating tools to track student progress, navigate course materials, and create interactive user interfaces, StudyFetch has enhanced the educational environment for students globally.

Ryan Trattner, CTO and Co-Founder at StudyFetch, noted, "Claude with tool use is accurate and cost-effective, and now powers our live voice-enabled AI tutoring sessions. Since implementing Claude with tool use, we've observed a 42% increase in positive human feedback."

Intuned

Intuned, a browser automation platform, utilizes Claude to power data extraction within their cloud platform. This AI-powered data extraction has significantly improved the developer experience in building and executing more reliable browser automations.

Faisal Ilaiwi, Co-Founder at Intuned, stated, "Claude 3 Haiku with tool use has been a game changer for us. Haiku is helping us scale our customers' data extraction tasks to a completely new level."

Hebbia

Hebbia, which focuses on AI knowledge workers for financial and legal services firms, uses Claude 3 Haiku to support complex, multi-step customer workflows. Divya Mehta, Product Manager at Hebbia, shared, "We leverage Claude 3 Haiku for generating live suggestions, automating prompt writing, and extracting key metadata from long documents. Haiku's tool use feature has unlocked capabilities and speed for our platform to generate reliable suggestions and prompts in real-time."

Getting Started

The tool use feature is now available on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Developers can explore the documentation and the Anthropic Cookbooks on tool use to get started.