Claude, the high-powered AI assistant from start-up Anthropic, can now be linked with Google’s Gmail and Calendar to help with organisation tasks.
Anthropic said the new link-up would be made available to paid subscribers to Claude, and will enable them to use the AI chatbot to search emails, review documents and help with calendar and scheduling tasks.
The move is the latest from an AI firm in the ongoing tech arms race in the sector to make their own AI-powered assistant stand out, and comes on the same day Google announced it was launching a new AI video generation tool within its Gemini Advanced AI assistant tool.
Anthropic, which is backed by investment from both Google and Amazon, is seeking to offer an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The firm said its update to Claude would make it a “more informed and capable collaborator”.
As well as the Google integration, Anthropic announced a new research capability which would enable Claude to search across both a user’s existing work and the web to help find information and provide more thorough answers.
Offering tools more capable of helping with research work in this fashion, and chatbots more able to “reason” and show the logic behind how it reaches an answer, have become the latest trend in commercial AI apps in recent months.
On its own update, Google said it would now allow users to create eight-second videos using text prompts created by its latest video model, Veo 2, and within Gemini for the first time.
Until now, users have only been able to generate AI images from within Gemini.
Many experts have raised concerns about AI-powered video generation, and how they could be used to spread disinformation.
Google said it had taken “important steps” to make video generation a “safe experience”, including watermarking every frame of videos created so it is clear they are AI-generated, and said it was continuing to work to ensure videos would not be generated that violated its policies.
