Claude, the AI chatbot built by tech giant Anthropic, has a lot going for it. While both ChatGPT and Gemini tend to have the fame, Claude is running in the background, offering a competitive alternative to your chatbot needs.
It doesn’t have the same fancy add-ons, like image generators or group chats, but what Claude lacks in bells and whistles, it makes up for with a laser focus on productivity.
One of the features that is especially noticeable for this is Claude’s ability to deal with incredibly long documents. This comes in handy often, but especially so if you’re looking to use Claude for your workflow.
Not sure where to start? Here’s some examples of ways that Claude’s impressive memory can get you ahead.
Document summaries
If you’ve ever opened a document to quickly find 50 pages of dense information, this will be for you. Claude is great for summarizing complicated documents, rapidly searching through to generate a clear overview of what you are reading.
Simply include a URL, upload a document or drop in a load of text, and ask Claude to summarize it to save you hours of time.
You can customize this sort of prompt to best fit your needs. For example, by asking Claude to include a short summary, followed by a more in-depth one, or by asking it to provide key points along with your summarization.
Fact check and verify
Whether it's a news article, or a report on the latest trends in advertising, some documents can hit you with huge amounts of information, all in one go. The challenge here can be checking that all of the facts and points are correct.
Claude can scan through a document, and fact-check every point that a piece of writing makes, even providing sources where necessary.
This can be a great backup when making sure a document that you are reading is reliable.
Try using the prompt:
Scan this text and verify any facts or figures mentioned. Provide sources for claims and inform me of any claims that seem like they lack validity.
You can go a step further, asking Claude to scan the text and give an overall score of how trustworthy the claims made are, giving an explanation of why.
Comparing multiple documents
One document can take a while to work through, multiple documents are eating into hours of your day.
If you want to take the data from multiple files, comparing them between each other, Claude can do that for you.
Upload a collection of documents, and ask Claude to analyze and compare them. This is especially useful for related files. For example, if you have a monthly report that goes out and you want to see the progress across them. Or, if you’re trying to learn about a new subject, and need a quick analysis of multiple research articles.
Finding useful data points
It’s not just articles and documents that Claude can scan. Where it can really thrive is big spreadsheets that, to the human eye, can mean absolutely nothing.
If you have a spreadsheet with tens of thousands of data points, all with confusing tags and figures, Claude can jump in and pick information out for you.
Want one specific entry? Or something that happened on a specific day? Send Claude in to find the information for you. Or even better, have it analyze the entire spreadsheet, creating a report of all of its more useful findings.
Grammar checker
AI chatbots can be fantastic tools for helping make your writing better. Insert long pieces of writing, and ask Claude for its feedback.
This can be changed to your specific needs. Claude can be used to check grammar and sentence structure, or it can be used to fully critique your writing, offering suggestions for improvements and even, if you’re feeling daring enough, tearing the text apart, giving harsh criticism.
While AI chatbots have always been useful for this, their context windows (how much they can analyze in one go) used to be much shorter. Now, you can give Claude a huge document, including pages and pages of text, and ask it to sub-edit it, or check for errors.
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