Remember those days when you wished you had a personal assistant to handle all your errands and answer your questions? Well, thanks to Anthropic‘s new AI feature for its Claude chatbot, that dream might be closer than ever.

This new tool, called “tool use” (or “function calling” for the tech-savvy folks), lets you build your own customized AI assistant. Imagine having a robot sidekick that can handle your emails, snag you the perfect pair of shoes online, or even give you real-time tech support.

Here’s the cool part: this AI assistant can connect with pretty much any web service you can think of. Think of these services as little programs that let different apps talk to each other. So, if you want your assistant to track your online orders, it can connect to the API (Application Programming Interface) of the shopping website you used.

And it’s not just about words – this AI can work with images too! Imagine a virtual interior decorator that analyzes pictures of your room and suggests furniture or paint colors. Pretty neat, right?

Getting started with your own AI assistant requires two things: access to an API and a little coding know-how. But don’t worry, Anthropic is making this tool available through several popular platforms like Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI.

The cost? It depends on how much your AI buddy talks. Anthropic charges based on the amount of text it processes, measured in “tokens” (think of them like words). During the testing phase, most users opted for the most affordable option, costing just pennies per million words used.

Anthropic has been testing this tool with a few thousand lucky customers since April, and the results are promising. One company, Study Fetch, even built a personalized AI tutor called Spark.E using this technology.

The rise of AI assistants seems unstoppable. Google is making your phone handle more of your shopping and searching, while OpenAI is developing a voice assistant that can even suggest an outfit change before a big interview!

But Anthropic’s new tool takes things a step further. It lets you create your own AI assistant, tailored specifically to your needs, without being locked into any one platform.